Hybrid Network Worm Emulation and Analysis

The worm experimental environment is the pivotal foundation for the worm research. Existing methods to build the environment can be classified into three categories: mathematical modeling, simulation and emulation. However, almost all of the existing methods inherently face a rigid fidelity-scalability tradeoff problem. Aming at this issue, this paper proposes a novel virtual-reality hybrid worm emulation model, which integrated the packet-level simulation and network emulation method to build worm experimental environment, for analyzing the behavior of worm propagation with respect to the changes of the network and worm characteristics. With the experiments, we analyze the impacts, induced by the network and worm characteristics on the worm propagation. The results indicate that our experimental environment can provide great support for the worm research.