Defending P2P networks against malicious worms based on benign worms

Abstract

Malicious worms can be exploited to steal user's privacy information, destroy the user system and launch DDOS attack. We proposed a method of forming secure P2P network using benign worms against malicious worms. The benign worm with a hitlist is used to patch and clean the corresponding malicious worm for peers in the P2P network which is based on the largest distance list. The spread of the benign worm is also a distributed patching process. The patch can be disseminated more quickly and the network congestion is much less than centralized patching scheme in P2P networks. In the experiments, after the benign worm accomplished its mission in the P2P network, almost all of the vulnerable and infected peers are healthy. The P2P network is secure to the malicious worm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.