DocumentCode :
845857
Title :
Modeling and Simulation Study of the Propagation and Defense of Internet E-mail Worms
Author :
Zou, Cliff C. ; Towsley, Don ; Gong, Weibo
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Central Florida Univ., Orlando, FL
Volume :
4
Issue :
2
fYear :
2007
Firstpage :
105
Lastpage :
118
Abstract :
As many people rely on e-mail communications for business and everyday life, Internet e-mail worms constitute one of the major security threats for our society. Unlike scanning worms such as Code Red or Slammer, e-mail worms spread over a logical network defined by e-mail address relationships, making traditional epidemic models invalid for modeling the propagation of e-mail worms. In addition, we show that the topological epidemic models presented by M. Boguna, et al. (2000) largely overestimate epidemic spreading speed in topological networks due to their implicit homogeneous mixing assumption. For this reason, we rely on simulations to study e-mail worm propagation in this paper. We present an e-mail worm simulation model that accounts for the behaviors of e-mail users, including e-mail checking time and the probability of opening an e-mail attachment. Our observations of e-mail lists suggest that an Internet e-mail network follows a heavy-tailed distribution in terms of node degrees, and we model it as a power-law network. To study the topological impact, we compare e-mail worm propagation on power-law topology with worm propagation on two other topologies: small-world topology and random-graph topology. The impact of the power-law topology on the spread of e-mail worms is mixed: E-mail worms spread more quickly on a power-law topology than on a small-world topology or a random-graph topology, but immunization defense is more effective on a power-law topology.
Keywords :
Internet; invasive software; telecommunication security; unsolicited e-mail; Internet e-mail worm; e-mail attachment; e-mail checking time; epidemic model; network security; power-law topology; random-graph topology; small-world topology; Business communication; Computer security; Computer viruses; Computer worms; Electronic mail; IP networks; Immune system; Internet; Network topology; Societies; Network security; e-mail worm; epidemic model; simulation.; worm modeling;
fLanguage :
English
Journal_Title :
Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on
Publisher :
ieee
ISSN :
1545-5971
Type :
jour
DOI :
10.1109/TDSC.2007.1001
Filename :
4198176
Link To Document :
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