Abstract
Interest-based communities, where users may have diversified interests and consequently cause communities overlapping, exist extensively in social networks. However, this will inevitably introduce more opportunities for malware spreading, whose propagation model is fundamentally different from that in currently widely-studied contact-based social networks. To address this issue, we firstly investigate the basic differences between interest-based communities and contact-based social networks. Then, the problem is formulated, and two malware propagation models in interest-based overlapping communities are put forward, one for early propagation stage and another for general propagation stage respectively. The proposed models fully consider the characters of such environment and reveal the malware spreading rules of different propagation stages in randomly overlapping interest communities. Moreover, the models are transformed into lightweight computational complexity modes so as to be easily utilized in practice. Finally, our models are verified with simulations which are based on a real-world dataset from YouTube interest communities, showing the analytical results match the simulation results very well.
Highlights
Online social network has become an important part of our daily lives [2]–[5], where the malware propagation can be especially accelerated by frequent interactions of the participants
SUMMARY AND FUTURE WORK In this paper, we firstly analyze the fundamental differences between interest-based communities and traditional contact-based social networks in the aspects of community boundary, connection pattern, and node dimension
After illustrating the special features of the communities’ structure, we propose a non-immune model based on SI epidemic model for randomly overlapping interest-based communities
Summary
Online social network has become an important part of our daily lives [2]–[5], where the malware propagation can be especially accelerated by frequent interactions of the participants. Current malware propagation models in contact-based social networks cannot be directly applied to interest-based overlapping communities. Fu et al [19] and Chen et al [20] consider a connection pattern similar with interest-based communities, but the communities in their works are totally separated from each other This is hardly true in practice considering that one user may have interests of different fields and thereby leads to communities overlapping. (1) We investigate the essential characters of interest-based communities on aspects of community boundary, connection pattern, and node dimension, which are compared with contact-based social networks in particular. (2) A non-immune malware propagation model, or shorten as non-immune model, is presented for early spreading stage in interest-based overlapping communities.
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