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A model of the spread of randomly scanning Internet worms that saturate access links

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Milan VojnovićAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), Volume 18, Issue 2

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 14

https://doi.org/10.1145/1346325.1346327

Published: 28 April 2008 Publication History

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Abstract

We present a simple, deterministic mathematical model for the spread of randomly scanning and bandwidth-saturating Internet worms. Such worms include Slammer and Witty, both of which spread extremely rapidly. Our model, consisting of coupled Kermack-McKendrick (a.k.a. stratified susceptibles-infectives (SI)) equations, captures both the measured scanning activity of the worm and the network limitation of its spread, that is, the effective scan-rate per worm/infective. The Internet is modeled as an ideal core network to which each peripheral (e.g., enterprise) network is connected via a single access link. It is further assumed in this note that as soon as a single end-system in the peripheral network is infected by the worm, the subsequent scanning of the rest of the Internet saturates the access link, that is, there is “instant” saturation. We fit our model to available data for the Slammer worm and demonstrate the model's ability to accurately represent Slammer's total scan-rate to the core.

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Index Terms

A model of the spread of randomly scanning Internet worms that saturate access links
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Distributed architectures
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Software system structures
      1. Distributed systems organizing principles

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cover image ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation Volume 18, Issue 2

April 2008

97 pages

ISSN:1049-3301

EISSN:1558-1195

DOI:10.1145/1346325

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 28 April 2008

Accepted: 01 April 2006

Revised: 01 October 2005

Received: 01 December 2004

Published in TOMACS Volume 18, Issue 2

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Magkos EAvlonitis MKotzanikolaou PStefanidakis M(2013)Toward early warning against Internet worms based on critical-sized networksSecurity and Communication Networks10.1002/sec.5346:1(78-88)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2013
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Defending against hitlist worms using network address space randomization

Modeling the spread of internet worms via persistently unpatched hosts

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