A Large-Scale Network Worm Emulation Experimental Environment

The worm experimental environment is the pivotal foundation for the worm research. Existing methods to build the environment, such as mathematical modeling, simulation and emulation, 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 based on our network emulation environment called LSNEMUlab, which integrated the packet-level simulation and network emulation method to build worm experimental environment. With the experiments, the impacts induced by the network and worm characteristics on the worm propagation are analyzed, and the different defense strategies are compared. The results show that the experimental environment is effective for worm characteristics and defense mechanism research.