Passive worms are prone to spreading through Peer-to-Peer networks, and they pose a great threat to the security of the network. In this paper, considering network heterogeneity and the number of hops a search can reach, we propose a novel mathematical model to study the dynamics of the propagation of passive worms. For the proposed model, the basic reproduction number is derived by employing the existence of the positive equilibrium. And the stabilities of the worm-free equilibrium and positive equilibrium are analyzed. Moreover, we verify the rationality of the model established by comparing the stochastic simulation with the numerical simulation. Finally, we examine the effect of the number of hops on the spread of passive worms and discuss the various immunization strategies. We find that if , the propagation speed of passive worms is accelerated with the increase of hop count ; if , the number of infected peers decreases rapidly with the increase of the value of and drops to zero eventually. Results show that the network topology and the number of hops can affect the spread of passive worms.
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