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Abstract According to security experts, additional diverse software platforms on the Internet will reduce the impact of malicious software, or malware. To evaluate this claim, we model interconnected computers with diverse platforms as networks with different node types. A node is isolated when malware control the information on the node’s connections. We determine the average fraction of isolated nodes when there is one malware outbreak per node type. The fraction drops as the number of node types increases, but the achievable reduction shrinks with increasingly dominant hubs, i.e., nodes with huge number of connections. Hence, just introducing more software platforms does not solve the malware problem. Instead, we show that multiple simultaneous epidemics all die out if hubs are immunized and the other nodes have enough diversity.
Last updated 18.01.12.
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