Dynamics for Proactive Defense through Self-hardening in the Presence or Absence of Anti Malicious Software

In computer networks, the computers can be categorized into two categories, one is susceptible or healthy and another is infected. The susceptible computers can have the Anti Malicious Software (AMS) or can not have to protect themselves from the malicious objects. In addition they can have a costly action to self-harden themselves against the malicious objects for proactive defense. The utility cost of being susceptible or infected is the major concern of this paper. The paper considers the role of AMS and the self-hardening action to find out the lifetime utility of a computer. This lifetime utility is beneficial to take the decision, whether the self-hardening/AMS has to be implemented in the computer network or not as it is costly action to protect the computer network from malicious objects.