Analyzing cooperative containment of fast scanning worms

Abstract

Fast scanning worms, that can infect nearly the entire vulnerable population in order of minutes, are among the most serious threats to the Internet today. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of cooperation among Internet firewalls in containing such worms. We first propose a model for firewall-level cooperation and then study the containment in our model of cooperation using analysis and simulation. Our results suggest that, with moderate overhead, cooperation among Internet firewalls can provide 95 % containment under 10 % deployment while being resilient to 100-1000 malicious firewalls. 1