Throttling Viruses: Restricting propagation to defeat malicious mobile code

  • Authors:
  • Matthew M. Williamson

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ACSAC '02 Proceedings of the 18th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Modern computer viruses spread incredibly quickly, farfaster than human-mediated responses. This greatly increasesthe damage that they cause. This paper presentsan approach to restricting this high speed propagation automatically.The approach is based on the observation thatduring virus propagation, an infected machine will connectto as many different machines as fast as possible. An uninfectedmachine has a different behaviour: connections aremade at a lower rate, and are locally correlated (repeatconnections to recently accessed machines are likely).This paper describes a simple technique to limit the rateof connections to "new" machines that is remarkably effectiveat both slowing and halting virus propagation withoutaffecting normal traffic. Results of applying the filter to webbrowsing data are included. The paper concludes by suggestingan implementation and discussing the potential andlimitations of this approach.