Worm Propagation with Differential Infectivity under Quarantine Control Strategy

Abstract

Malwares have sharp resemblance with the biological pathogens in terms of propagation. Biological pathogens spread from one living being to another in very short span of time. Similarly malwares also propagate rapidly from one host to another host and one network to another network, in order to spread infection in major scale. This spread can be epidemic if control strategies are not called in time. In order to timely intervene, study of epidemic behavior is very important. In this paper we develop SI1I2Q1Q2R1R2 model of worm propagation under quarantine control strategy. We have considered different infective, quarantined and recovered (or removed) group in our model. The motivation of such model came from the study of propagation dynamics of HIV. Our worm propagation and its quarantined based defense is based on stagedprogression (SP) hypothesis of HIV. We have studied in this paper the stability of worm free equilibrium condition and analyzed the epidemic state condition in terms of reproduction number. When reproduction number is greater than one the worm propagation become epidemic. If it is less than one then infection diminishes. Extensive analysis and simulation has been done to validate our system. Simulation result shows that effective quarantine strategy helps in controlling the epidemic outbreak of worms in networks.