Propagation of Active Worms in P2P Networks: Modeling and Analysis

Active worms, a category of self-replicating malicious programs which could spread in an automated fashion and flood particular Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks within very short time, have drawn significant attention. However, only limited number of studies focus on propagation model of active worms with fair consideration of P2P nodes’ dynamic features consisting of P2P churn, random quarantine, regular immunization, dynamic fragmentation and etc. This paper proposes three propagation models of active worms under dynamic P2P environment, conducts a mathematical analysis on the propagation of active worms under presented models and provides extensive numerical studies to the impact of relevant parameters on active worms’ propagation speed under dynamic P2P environment. Models presented in this paper are simple, effective and thus applicable for defending against active worms in real P2P networks.