Simulating Email Worm Propagation Based
on Social Network and User Behavior
Kexin Yin1, Wanlong Li1, Ming Hu3, and Jianqi Zhu2
1School of Computer Science and Engineering, Changchun University of Technology,
China
2School
of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University,
China
3School of Computer Technology and Engineering,
Changchun Institute of Technology, China
Abstract: Email worms pose a significant security threat to organizations and
computer users today. Because they propagate over a logical network, the
traditional epidemic model is unsuitable for modeling their propagation over
the internet. However, it is no doubt that accurate modeling the propagation of
email worms is helpful to contain th9eir attacks in advance. This paper
presents a novel email worms’ propagation model, which is based on a directed
and weighted social network. Moreover, the effects of user’s behavior are also
considered in this model. To the author’s knowledge, there is little
information available considering the effects of them in modeling their
propagation. A simulation algorithm is designed for verifying the effectiveness
of the presented model. The results show that the presented model can describe
the propagation of email worms accurately. Through simulating different containing
strategies, we demonstrate that the infected key nodes in email social
community can speed up the worm propagating. Last, a new General Susceptible
Infectious Susceptible (G-SIS) email worm model is presented, which can predict
the propagation scale of email worms accurately.
Keywords: Network security,
Email worm propagation, social network, user Behavior, G-SIS.
Received April 2, 2016; accepted November 27, 2017