SADI: A novel model to study the propagation of social worms in hierarchical networks

As more and more people rely on social networks for business and life, social worms constitute one of the major security threats to our society. Modern social worms exhibit two new features, message notification and the temporal characteristic of human mobility. Message notification indicates a user will get a reminder once a new message comes to a social account. The temporal characteristic of human mobility indicates a user can operate corresponding computer in different locations with different resting time. Previous scholars have proposed some analytical models for the propagation dynamics of social worms. However, they did not consider the above two features and there is one critical problem unrealized, which is structural imperfection of network topology. Previous models have not taken into account the hierarchical topology structure, which results from a many-to-many relationship between users and hosts. To address these problems, we model propagation dynamics of social worms oriented hierarchical networks in this paper, and the proposed model accurately describes the propagation behavior of social worms. We conduct both a theoretical analyses and extensive simulations to show our model can overcome inaccuracy in the number of infected nodes and provide a stronger approximation for the worm propagation. The results show that our model presented in this paper achieves a greater accuracy in characterizing the propagation of modern social worms.