Visibility-Aware Optimal Contagion of Malware Epidemics

DOI10.1109/TAC.2016.2632426zbMATH Open1390.68070arXiv1507.03528OpenAlexW3098427309MaRDI QIDQ4566898FDOQ4566898

Authors: Soheil Eshghi, Saswati Sarkar, Santosh S. Venkatesh 

Publication date: 27 June 2018

Published in: IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Recent innovations in the design of computer viruses have led to new trade-offs for the attacker. Multiple variants of a malware may spread at different rates and have different levels of visibility to the network. In this work we examine the optimal strategies for the attacker so as to trade off the extent of spread of the malware against the need for stealth. We show that in the mean-field deterministic regime, this spread-stealth trade-off is optimized by computationally simple single-threshold policies. Specifically, we show that only one variant of the malware is spread by the attacker at each time, as there exists a time up to which the attacker prioritizes maximizing the spread of the malware, and after which she prioritizes stealth.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03528

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Internet topics (68M11)

Cited In (3)

• A Novel Contagion-Like Patch Dissemination Mechanism against Peer-to-Peer File-Sharing Worms
• Individual-based optimal weight adaptation for heterogeneous epidemic spreading networks
• A nonlinear optimal control method against the spreading of epidemics

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