This book is a collection of the author's early research work and practice in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) towards cybersecurity protection. The papers can be considered a representation of similar work by other scientists, researchers, and practitioners in the same field during the mid-1980s.
One of the papers included in this book describes an expert system or knowledge-based system that performs security inspection of a VAX/VMS System over a DECnet-based network. The expert system was placed in production use within Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC, later acquired by HP) from 1987 to 1992. DECnet was once a coexistent network protocol suite and product with today's TCP/IP Internet. The internal code name for the expert system was called XSAFE, following the naming conventions of the leading expert systems in the 1980s. XSAFE at its peak was inspecting or performing network-based scans for the security vulnerabilities of close to 54,000 VAX/VMS devices. These devices or nodes were connected and formed DEC's internal network, code name Easynet. Later on, an upgraded version of XSAFE was developed and was capable of scanning DEC Ultrix nodes (a variation of Unix) over a TCP/IP-based network for security vulnerabilities.
The collection of papers in this book are organized in the following categories: Patents granted by the U.S. Patent Office; Papers published at various security conferences and AI conferences; Master Thesis at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (more commonly known as WPI).