Passive Benign Worm Propagation Modeling with Dynamic Quarantine Defense

Abstract

Worm attacks can greatly distort network performance, and countering infections can exact a heavy toll on economic and technical resources. Worm modeling helps us to better understand the spread and propagation of worms through a network, and combining effective types of mitigation techniques helps prevent and mitigate the effects of worm attacks. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model which combines both dynamic quarantine and passive benign worms. This Passive Worm Dynamic Quarantine (PWDQ) model departs from previous models in that infected hosts will be recovered either by passive benign worms or quarantine measure. Computer simulation shows that the performance of our proposed model is significantly better than existing models, in terms of decreasing the number of infectious hosts and reducing the worm propagation speed.