Modeling malware propagation in Gnutella type peer-to-peer networks

A key emerging and popular communication paradigm, primarily employed for information dissemination, is peer-to-peer (P2P) networking. In this paper, we model the spread of malware in decentralized, Gnutella type of peer-to-peer networks. Our study reveals that the existing bound on the spectral radius governing the possibility of an epidemic outbreak needs to be revised in the context of a P2P network. We formulate an analytical model that emulates the mechanics of a decentralized Gnutella type of peer network and study the spread of malware on such networks. We show analytically, that a framework which does not incorporate the behavioral characteristics of peers ends up over estimating the epidemic threshold metric, R₀. This in turn results in false positives, an undesirable feature. We also characterize the conditions under which the network may reach a malware free equilibrium and validate our theoretical results with numerical simulations