A SEIR model for computer virus spreading based on cellular automata

Abstract

There are a great variety of specimens of malware: computer viruses, computer worms, trojans, etc. Nowadays, malware is one of the most important computer security problem and the source of great financial losses. Consequently, it is necessary to design tools that allow one to simulate the behavior of malware propagation. These tools are based on mathematical models and the great majority of them tackle the study of a particular type of malware called computer worms. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there are few models devoted to the study of the spreading of computer viruses. In this sense, the main goal of this work is to introduce a new mathematical model, based on cellular automata, to analyze the epidemic behavior of computer virus. Specifically, it is a SEIR (Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered) model where the nodes of the network are divided into four compartments: susceptible, exposed, infected and recovered.