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Design space and analysis of worm defense strategies

Published: 21 March 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We give the first systematic investigation of the design space of worm defense system strategies. We accomplish this by providing a taxonomy of defense strategies by abstracting away implementation-dependent and approach-specific details and concentrating on the fundamental properties of each defense category. Our taxonomy and analysis reveals the key parameters for each strategy that determine its effectiveness. We provide a theoretical foundation for understanding how these parameters interact, as well as simulation-based analysis of how these strategies compare as worm defense systems. Finally, we offer recommendations based upon our taxonomy and analysis on which worm defense strategies are most likely to succeed. In particular, we show that a hybrid approach combining Proactive Protection and Reactive Antibody Defense is the most promising approach and can be effective even against the fastest worms such as hitlist worms. Thus, we are the first to demonstrate with theoretic and empirical models which defense strategies will work against the fastest worms such as hitlist worms.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASIACCS '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM Symposium on Information, computer and communications security
March 2006
384 pages
ISBN:1595932720
DOI:10.1145/1128817
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 March 2006

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Author Tags

  1. antibody
  2. blacklisting
  3. defense strategy analysis
  4. local containment
  5. proactive protection
  6. worm propagation
  7. worm taxonomy
  8. worms

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