Modeling and Analysis of Malware Propagation for Cluster-based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to the limited resources of wireless sensor network nodes, they possess generally weak defense capabilities and are often the target of malware attacks. Attackers can capture or infect specific sensor nodes and propagation malware to other sensor nodes in WSNs through node communication. This can eventually infect an entire network system and even cause paralysis. Based on epidemiological theory, we propose a malware propagation model suitable for cluster-based WSNs to analyze the propagation dynamic of malware. The model focuses on the data transmission characteristics between different nodes in a cluster-based network and considers the actual application parameters of WSNs such as nodes communication radius, nodes distributed density and nodes death rate. In particular, we derive the basic reproductive number, equilibrium point and its stability of the model. We found that a basic reproductive number of less than 1 leads to the eventual disappearance of malware, which provides a deep insight into the design of defense strategies against such threats. We conducted numerical experiments to validate our theory and also examined the influence of WSN parameters on malware propagation.