Dominating set based Virus Immunization in Computer Networks

Abstract

The behavior of viruses in a computer network isto attack a single node in the network and starts spreading toother nodes. Once an attack has occurred, then the main defenseagainst the attacks is to immunize the affected nodes and protectthe nodes around the infected nodes. Specific nodes are selectedfor immunization and thereby controlling the dissemination ofviruses to more nodes in the network. This paper concentrates on node selection process in the network. For the survival of thenetwork, immunization should take place at the optimized nodesso that further spreading should be less. There are many methodsin selecting nodes from the network for immunization. Randomselection of nodes, selecting nodes with priority, selecting nodesusing graph reduction strategy etc are some methods in selectinga node from the network for controlling the growth of virusattack. In this paper we propose a novel way for selecting nodesfrom virus affected network, so that the spreading of virus canbe mitigated. Dominating set of a network can be used for nodeselection process.Set of nodes from which any other nodes in the network can be reached is called dominating set of that network. Here we also propose an algorithm for finding dominating set from a given graph. Immunizing those nodes in the dominating setwill decrease the dispersion of virus in the network.