A Novel Simulation System Oriented Description Language of Worm Propagation

Abstract

Software simulation is one of the most common methods to study worm propagation. However, simulation process and software interface, which lack unified description, cause inefficiencies of worm propagation simulation. In order to achieve a unified description for worm propagation simulation process, we propose a Worm Propagation Simulation Description Language (WPSDL), which characterizes the software interfaces and parameters of each module in simulation process in a unified way. Meanwhile, we develop a simulation system of worm propagation oriented our presented language. In this system, we use related commands of the description language as interactive instructions, and then implement worm propagation simulation for different types of network worms. In addition, we conduct a series of experiments to analyse the impacts of worm propagation mechanism and network topology structure. The experiments show that increasing infection ability and scanning rate can improve the propagation scale significantly, and the propagation delay can influence the outbreak time and explosion intensity of worm propagation. The experiments not only provide support for the study of worm propagation mechanisms, but also verify the practicability of the description language and the simulation system.