Modeling Dynamics of Malware with Incubation Period from the View of Individual

In the last few years, the growing popularity of mobile devices with rich wireless communication capabilities has made them attractive to digital viruses and malicious contents. The user mobility and novel proximity-based communication technologies on one hand facilitate the information sharing and dissemination among people, on the other hand they increase the possibility of spreading malware. Understanding the propagation characteristics of malware could aid in planning protection strategies, but the most of the current models discuss it from the view of whole network. In this paper, we establish the model from the perspective of individuals by using Markov chain. Our model investigates the incubation period and remaining life time of a mobile smartphone when it is infected by malware. The numerical results provide comprehensive and intuitive explanations which are more realistic in real world.