Active Worm Propagation in Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Network Management Systems

Currently there is a growing belief that using peer-to-peer (P2P) approach leads to noticeable improvement in the performance of network management systems (NMSs). However P2P systems can be potential vehicle for active worms which can spread in all manager peers in a short time. This issue has not been studied in the literature. In this paper we address effects of active worm propagation in a P2P network management system in which nodes are structured in several hierarchal levels. We intend to evaluate the speed of propagation in the system. To aim at this goal, we perform extensive simulation study and investigate the parameters influencing the speed of propagation such as the number of vulnerable host managers, degree of connections between peer managers inside the groups, the number of connections between different groups of managers in the hierarchical structure. We further compare worm propagation in different levels of hierarchy by different types of active worm attack strategies. We show that in addition to P2P parameters hierarchical structure affect the speed of active worm propagation. This issue suggests that P2P network management systems are more vulnerable in comparison to classical NMSs when they face to security attacks. Therefore to realize implementation of P2P NMSs security concerns should be taken into account.