Gleer: A Novel Gini-Based Energy Balancing Scheme for Mobile Botnet Retopology

Abstract

Mobile botnet has recently evolved due to the rapid growth of smartphone technologies. Unlike legacy botnets, mobile devices are characterized by limited power capacity, calculation capabilities, and wide communication methods. As such, the logical topology structure and communication mode have to be redesigned for mobile botnets to narrow energy gap and lower the reduction speed of nodes. In this paper, we try to design a novel Gini-based energy balancing scheme (Gleer) for the atomic network, which is a fundamental component of the heterogeneous multilayer mobile botnet. Firstly, for each operation cycle, we utilize the dynamic energy threshold to categorize atomic network into two groups. Then, the Gini coefficient is introduced to estimate botnet energy gap and to regulate the probability for each node to be picked as a region C&C server. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method can effectively prolong the botnet lifetime and prevent the reduction of network size. Meanwhile, the stealthiness of botnet with Gleer scheme is analyzed from users’ perspective, and results show that the proposed scheme works well in the reduction of user’ detection awareness.