Dynamical analysis of a malware propagation model considering the impacts of mobile devices and software diversification

Abstract

The aim has been to model the dynamics of malware propagation in scale-free networks (SFNs) with birth and death rates. The proposed model is a variant of susceptible–exposed–infectious–recovered–susceptible with a vaccination (SEIRS-V). This model is extended for modeling malware propagation between computer nodes and mobile devices (MDs), which is called MD-SEIRS-V. Unlike other existing models, MD-SEIRS-V principally considers the impacts of diversification as a defense mechanism to reduce epidemic spreading in SFNs. Dynamical behavior of the model is determined by the basic reproductive ratio. Furthermore, we calculate the critical number of diverse software packages installed on computer nodes that can be used as a parameter to prevent epidemic spreading. The dynamics of malware propagation is analyzed and shown that the local and global stability of malware-free equilibrium are equivalent. We have also carried out a series of numerical simulations to evaluate the dynamical behaviors of malware propagation in SFNs.