Title: On the scalability of Delay-Tolerant Botnets

Authors: Zesheng Chen, Chao Chen, Qian Wang

Addresses: Department of Engineering, Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne IN, 46805, USA. ' Department of Engineering, Indiana University – Purdue University Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne IN, 46805, USA. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University, Miami FL, 33174, USA

Abstract: In this work, we present a novel intelligent botnet, called the delay-tolerant botnet, that intentionally adds random delays to command propagation and endeavours to avoid detection. We then study the scalability of delay-tolerant botnets. Specifically, we apply mathematical analysis to derive the average delay required to distribute a command to all bots in three types of command and control architectures: centralised, distributed, and hybrid delay-tolerant botnets. We find that in all cases, the delay increases approximately logarithmically with the number of bots, indicating that the delay-tolerant botnets are scalable. Finally, we verify the analytical results by simulations.

Keywords: network security; DTBs; delay-tolerant botnets; scalability; botnet delay; random delays; command propagation; intrusion detection; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSN.2010.037664

International Journal of Security and Networks, 2010 Vol.5 No.4, pp.248 - 258

Received: 22 Jul 2009
Accepted: 17 Feb 2010
Published online: 23 Dec 2010 *

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