Breaking Monocultures in P2P Networks for Worm Prevention

Peer-to-peer (P2P) worm has become an interesting research topic during recent years. It is widely believed that the monoculture of P2P systems results in fast worm propagation in P2P networks and software diversity can decrease the virulence of worms and the effectiveness of repeated applications of single attacks. In order to break monocultures in P2P networks, we propose a P2P-based software diversity model and conduct both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations to test the performance of software diversity in containing P2P worm propagation. We find that our proposed software diversity model can efficiently improve the performance of worm prevention in P2P networks