Malicious Code Modeling and Analysis in WiFi-Based MANETs

The growing popularity of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) makes them increasingly attractive to malicious code writers, and malicious code targeting MANETs has already begun to appear. In this paper, using the theories of complex networks, we present a propagation model of malicious code in WiFi-based MANETs and investigate the propagating behaviors of the malicious code in such networks by means of simulations. The simulation results show that the threshold of the malicious code in WiFi-base MANETs is greatly higher than the value found in the Internet while the propagation speed is remarkably slower than that in the Internet. We also find that the active MAC protocol can affect the propagating properties of the malicious code.