Closing the Pandora’s Box: Defenses for Thwarting Epidemic Outbreaks in Mobile Adhoc Networks
Project Members
Rahul Potharaju, Endadul Hoque, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Saswati Sarkar, Santosh S. Venkatesh
Rahul Potharaju, Endadul Hoque, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Saswati Sarkar, Santosh S. Venkatesh
Abstract
With the advent of Google’s Android, the world has observed a dramatic increase in the number of wireless devices with complex capabilities and supporting open source OSes. While the openness of OSes induces developers’ motivation, it also introduces a new propagation vector for mobile malware. In this paper, we model the propagation of mobile malware using theory of epidemiology and study the problem as a function of the underlying mobility models. We define the optimal approach to heal an infected system with a set of static-healers as the T-COVER problem and show that it is NP-HARD. We then propose two families of healer protocols - a time-optimized randomized version that is simple to implement and an energy-optimized profile-based version that enables a healer to “learn” about its proximity to make better decisions. We show through extensive simulations using the NS-3 simulator that despite lacking knowledge of the future, our healer-based protocols show reasonable performance when compared to an oracle-based solution.