Decapitation via Digital Epidemics: A Bio-Inspired Transmissive Attack
This work addresses security vulnerabilities in modern communication systems for cybersecurity practitioners, but it appears incremental as it summarizes existing concepts and connections.
The paper tackles the problem of targeted attacks using malware that spreads through interconnected communication systems, drawing analogies to biological epidemics, and discusses simulations, experiments, and research challenges without providing specific results or numbers.
The evolution of communication technology and the proliferation of electronic devices have rendered adversaries powerful means for targeted attacks via all sorts of accessible resources. In particular, owing to the intrinsic interdependency and ubiquitous connectivity of modern communication systems, adversaries can devise malware that propagates through intermediate hosts to approach the target, which we refer to as transmissive attacks. Inspired by biology, the transmission pattern of such an attack in the digital space much resembles the spread of an epidemic in real life. This paper elaborates transmissive attacks, summarizes the utility of epidemic models in communication systems, and draws connections between transmissive attacks and epidemic models. Simulations, experiments, and ongoing research challenges on transmissive attacks are also addressed.