FPM: Four-factors Propagation Model for passive P2P worms

• FPM considers four important factors, making it be close to real situations.
• Differential equations of FPM are explicitly derived.
• Worm behaviors in steady state are research in depth.
• Two suggestions for worm containment are proposed.

At present, P2P worm poses a serious threat to the Internet infrastructure and common users since it spreads extremely fast and is hard to be detected in early stage. In this paper, we propose a Four-factors Propagation Model (FPM) for passive P2P worms. There are two major contributions of this paper. Firstly, we take four critical factors—address hiding, configuration diversity, online/offline behaviors and download duration into consideration. As far as we know, the first two factors have not been considered in existing models yet. Secondly, we explicitly derive the differential equations of our FPM. Then worm behaviors in steady state are researched in depth by numerical methods. The following simulations give two suggestions for worm quarantining. On one hand, worms can be slowed down by increasing the proportion of hosts with internal addresses. One the other, breaking the configuration monocultures of hosts is an efficient way to contain worms.