Propagation Modeling of Peer-to-Peer Worms

Propagation of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) worms in the Internet is posing a serious challenge to network security because of P2P worms' increasing complexity and sophistication, significant damages their propagation can cause, and recent popularity of P2P networks with increasing number of users. No existing work has solved the problem of propagation modeling of P2P worms due to its complexity. This paper presents a study on propagation modeling of P2P worms. It also presents our applications of the proposed approach in worm propagation research. Our major contributions in this paper are firstly, we propose a novel logic matrix approach to modeling the propagation of P2P worms, and demonstrate the approach's ease of employment through the simulation experiments; and secondly, we find the impacts of the network-related characteristics on a P2P worm's attack performance in structured P2P networks, and a critical value of vulnerability rate. The proposed discrete-time deterministic propagation model of a P2P worm is written in a difference equation of logic matrix. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first using logic matrix in network security research in general and worm propagation research in particular. The proposed approach's ease of employment makes it an attractive instrument to conduct worm propagation research.