Optimal Reset Strategies for Mitigating Malware Epidemics

As the size of the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, so does its vulnerability to malicious attacks. When such an attack occurs, one of the only means of defense available to a system controller before a patch is developed is resetting devices to a known malware-free state. In this paper, we study the design of reset strategies which optimize the network's performance when under a malware attack. In particular, we show that under mild assumptions, the problem of optimizing the network's performance can be posed as an optimal control problem for a Markov chain with a number of states and actions which grows polynomially with respect to the size of the network. We investigate our results with simulation.