On the Stability of the Malware Free Equilibrium in Cell Phones Networks With Spatial Dynamics

Recent outbreaks of virus and worm attacks targeted at cell phones have bought to the forefront the seriousness of the security threat to this increasingly popular means of communication. In this paper, the authors develop an analytic framework for modeling the dynamics of malware propagation in networks of mobile smart phones. They then characterize the conditions under which the network may reach a malware free equilibrium and derive the necessary conditions for its global asymptotic stability. The model accounts for malware transfers through a number of communication paradigms including the Internet, the telephone network, Bluetooth and WiFi in addition to accounting for the mobility of cell phones and the impact of the heterogeneous environments they pass through on the malware dynamics.