Towards a framework for worm-defense evaluation

Computer worms are a serious problem. Much research has been done to detect and contain worms. One major deficiency in most research is that the claims are supported by theoretic models or simulations only and not by realistic tests. Network testbeds such as emulab and deter can be used to conduct worm experiments on networks of a few hundreds nodes. However, setting up such an experiment is not trivial. In this paper, we describe a wrapper around emulab to deploy such experiments quickly. We also demonstrate its use by evaluating an example worm containment strategy.