An interacting automata model for network protection

Malicious network activity is rapidly increasing. To understand and engineer countermeasures to network attacks, we have developed cellular automata models of network flow dynamics and associated attacks. We describe the theoretical development of our model and compare it to existing models of network flow based on statistical physics. Using our model, we have found empirical evidence that a link exists between the behavior of a network and its entropy. This paper discusses potential extensions of this work to entropy-based intrusion detection systems (IDS).