Simulation and Analysis on the Resiliency and Efficiency of Malnets

More work by the team from yesterday's paper, again on difficult to remove malware.

Future network intruders will probably use an organized army of malicious nodes (here called "malnodes", or collectively a "malnet") to deliver many different attacks, rather than recruiting a disorganized set of compromised nodes per attack. However, partly due to the lack of understanding of the resiliency and efficiency a malnet can have, countering malnets has been ineffctive.

This paper begins to address this defficiency Through calculation and simulation for three representative malnets|random, small-world, and Gnutella-like|we show that extremely resilient malnets can be formed to deliver attack code quickly. In particular, we show that disconnecting malnets is possible, but extremely naive approaches such as randomly disinfecting malnodes will not suffice, and effective defenses must either happen very quickly during a second-wave attack, or take effect prior to it.

Source: Simulation and analysis on the resiliency and efficiency of malnets, Jun Li, Toby Ehrenkranz, Geoff Kuenning, and Peter Reiher, in Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation PADS '05.