An immunization strategy for social network worms based on network vertex influence

Along with the rapid development of social networks, social network worms have constituted one of the major internet security problems. The root of worm is the inevitable software vulnerability during the design and implementation process of software. So it is hard to completely avoid worms in the existing software engineering systems. Due to lots of bandwidth consumption, the patch cannot be transmitted simultaneously by the network administrator to all hosts. This paper studies how to prevent the propagation of social network worms through the immunization of key nodes. Unlike existing containment models for worm propagation, a novel immunization strategy is proposed based on network vertex influence. The strategy selects the critical vertices in the whole network. Then the immunization is applied on the selected vertices to achieve the maximal effect of worm containment with minimal cost. Different algorithms are implemented to select vertices. Simulation experiments are presented to analyze and evaluate the performance of different algorithms.