Various kinds of active worms have been plunging into the network flows, which make the Internet security problem more serious. Our research on a potential propagation approach of active worms, P2P-based propagation approach, is given in this paper. To measure the propagating performance of our approach, the SEI (Susceptible-Exposed- Infected) propagation model is presented. It proves that with the idea of pure P2P architecture, worms can be hidden in the early stage of propagation, and then infect most of the hosts in a shorter period. By comparing our SEI propagation model with the Simple Epidemic Model, we observe that the size of a worm is a significant parameter which can affect the propagating performance. When the size of the worm becomes large, our approach can still show an excellent propagating performance.
