A cooperative immunization system for an untrusting internet

Abstract

Viruses and worms are one of the most common causes of security problems in computer systems today. Users attempt to protect machines from such attacks by using anti-virus programs and firewalls, with a mixed record of success at best. One of the main problems with these solutions is that they rely on manual configurations and human intervention, and may fail to react in time to defend against an attack. We present a cooperative immunization system that helps defend against these types of attacks. The nodes in our system cooperate and inform each other of ongoing attacks and the actions necessary to defend. To evaluate our proposal, we discuss a simple virus model and evaluate our system using simulation. Our measurements show that our algorithm is more effective against viruses and more robust against malicious participants in the immunization system.