Multiscale Modeling and Simulation of Worm Effects on the Internet Routing Infrastructure

An unexpected consequence of recent worm attacks on the Internet was that the routing infrastructure showed evidence of increased BGP announcement churn. As worm propagation dynamics are a function of the topology of a very large-scale network, a faithful simulation model must capture salient features at a variety of resolution scales. This paper describes our efforts to model worm propagation and its affect on routers and application traffic. Using our implementations of the Scalable Simulation Framework (SSF) API, we model worm propagation, its affect on the routing infrastructure and its affect on application traffic using multiscale traffic models.