Structural Robustness in Peer to Peer Botnets

Due to the steady evolution and increase in sophistication of peer to peer botnets, it is necessary to understand the structural potential in this type of intruder tool. We formally model the P2P botnets with the help of complex systems. We propose metrics to measure the structural potential of different types of P2P botnets. We also propose a simulative framework to investigate the robustness of P2P botnets in face of various targeted response. In particular, We have shown that naive defenses donpsilat work. Simply randomly remove infected nodes does not slow down the attacker much, regardless of whether the connectivity between peer bots follows a random or scale-free pattern. We found that the degree based response on P2P botnets offer best approach. Our works also show that the simulation approach revealed some invariant properties of the P2P botnets and open an insight about functional aspects of their topology in terms of robustness and communication efficiency.