Monoculture (computer science)

In the field of computer science, monoculture is a term used to describe a community of computers, all running identical software. All the computer systems in the community have the same vulnerabilities, and, like agricultural monocultures, are subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a successful attack.

This concept is significant when discussing computer security and viruses. In particular, Dan Geer has argued that Microsoft is a monoculture, since a majority of the overall number of computers connected to the Internet are workstations and servers running versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, many of which are vulnerable to the same attacks.