On Modeling Malware Propagation in Interest-Based Overlapping Communities

Interest-based communities, where users may have diversified interests and consequently cause communities overlapping, exist extensively in social networks. However, this will inevitably introduce more opportunities for malware spreading, whose propagation model is fundamentally different from that in currently widely-studied contact-based social networks. To address this issue, we firstly investigate the basic differences between interest-based communities and contact-based social networks. Then, the problem is formulated, and two malware propagation models in interest-based overlapping communities are put forward, one for early propagation stage and another for general propagation stage respectively. The proposed models fully consider the characters of such environment and reveal the malware spreading rules of different propagation stages in randomly overlapping interest communities. Moreover, the models are transformed into lightweight computational complexity modes so as to be easily utilized in practice. Finally, our models are verified with simulations which are based on a real-world dataset from YouTube interest communities, showing the analytical results match the simulation results very well.