Experiences with worm propagation simulations

Abstract

Fast Internet worms are a relatively new threat to Internet infrastructure and hosts. We discuss motivation and possibilities to study the behaviour of such worms and degrees of freedom that worm writers have. To facilitate the study of fast worms we have designed a simulator. We describe the design of this simulator and discuss practical experiences we have made with it and compare observation of past worms with simulated behaviour. One specific feature of the simulator is that the Internet model used can represent network bandwidth and latency constraints.