Dynamic analysis of asleep-awake mechanism from the perspective of inhibiting the spread of malware

With the increasing prevalence of 5 G and Internet of Things technologies, the threats posed by malware have escalated, highlighting the urgent need for more effective and practical defense mechanisms. ASleep-aWake Mechanisms (SWM), widely used for resource conservation, operate by regulating appropriate transition rates between device awake and asleep states. However, their potential capability to mitigate the spread of malware has been overlooked. In this paper, we propose the SW-VCV (aSleep-aWake-Vulnerable-Compromised-Vulnerable) model as a framework for analyzing the effectiveness of two SWM-based mechanisms—Continuous-Time (CT)-SWM and Fixed-Period-Pulse (FPP)-SWM—in controlling the propagation of malware and establishing their stability conditions. Building upon these conditions and incorporating objective functions, we apply the hybrid optimal control framework to propose improved versions of CT-SWM and FPP-SWM. The effectiveness of the proposed improvements is verified through comparative experiments with State-Dependent-Pulse (SDP)-SWM. The experimental results demonstrate that in synthetic networks, the improved FPP-SWM achieves the best balance in certain scenarios among suppressing malware propagation, maintaining the number of awake devices, and minimizing operational costs. In contrast, while SDP-SWM effectively inhibits the spread of malware, it does so at the cost of reducing the number of awake devices and incurring high operational costs. In real-world networks, SDP-SWM demonstrates exceptional performance, outperforming both the improved CT-SWM and FPP-SWM in the power grid. However, in other real-world topologies, SDP-SWM exhibits the same limitations observed in synthetic networks, with the improved FPP-SWM remaining the optimal choice in certain scenarios. The characteristic of controls in these scenarios focuses on maximizing the number of asleep devices while reducing the number of awake devices as quickly as possible.