Influence Evaluation of Centrality-Based Random Scanning Strategy on Early Worm Propagation Rate

Smart devices interconnected through Internet became one of everyday items. In particular, we are now able to access Internet anywhere and anytime with our smartphones. To support the ad-hoc access to Internet by using smartphones, the computer network structure has become more complex. Also, a certain network node is highly connected to support the diverse Internet services. In this paper, we note that when a node is infected by malicious programs, their propagation speeds from the node with a high level of centrality will be faster than those from the node with a low level of centrality, which identifies the most important nodes within a network. From experiments under diverse worm propagation parameters and the well-known network topologies, we evaluate the influence of Centrality-based random scanning strategy on early worm propagation rate. Therefore, we show that centrality-based random scanning strategy, where an initial infected node selects the victim based on the level of centrality, can make random scanning worms propagate rapidly compared to Anonymity-based random scanning strategy, where an initial infected node selects the victim uniformly.