Worm Versus Alert: Who Wins in a Battle for Control of a Large-Scale Network?

Consider the following game between a worm and an alert3 over a network of n nodes. Initially, no nodes are infected or alerted and each node in the network is a special detector node independently with small but constant probability. The game starts with a single node becoming infected. In every round thereafter, every infected node sends out a constant number of worms to other nodes in the population, and every alerted node sends out a constant number of alerts. Nodes in the network change state according to the following four rules: 1) If a worm is received by a node that is not a detector and is not alerted, that node becomes infected; 2) If a worm is received by a node that is a detector, that node becomes alerted; 3) If an alert is received by a node that is not infected, that node becomes alerted; 4) If a worm or an alert is received by a node that is already infected or already alerted, then there is no change in the state of that node. We make two assumptions about this game. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: OPODIS
• Authors: James Aspnes, Navin Rustagi, Jared Saia
• Keywords: Alerted Nodes, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Infected Nodes, Node, OPODIS 2007