Mathematical models have been utilized to help understand the epidemic spreading of malicious codes (e.g., computer virus and worms). However, existing such models are either adapted from the ones developed to capture the epidemic spreading of biologically infectious diseases in homogeneous systems, or suitable only for a very specific class of heterogeneous systems. In this paper we present an attempt at building an analytic model of epidemic spreading of malicious codes in arbitrary heterogeneous systems.
['Xiaohu Li', 'T. Paul Parker', 'Shouhuai Xu']
Towards an analytic model of epidemic spreading in heterogeneous systems