Smallest Botnet Firewall Building Problem and a Girvan-Newman Algorithm-Based Heuristic Solution

This paper formulates the Smallest Botnet Firewall Building Problem and proposes a heuristic solution based on the Girvan-Newman algorithm. The problem is to build the smallest white-hat botnet as a firewall to prevent the further spread of a malicious botnet. For this problem, a brute-force solution has been proposed, but it requires an enormous amount of computation time as the size of the network increases. The proposed heuristic solution uses the Girvan-Newman algorithm to find communities covering a specified number or more nodes, then computes the minimum cut between each community and the malicious botnet, and finally obtains the number and placement of needed white-hat bots based on the connection of the cuts. The proposed solution yields similar results to the brute-force solution, while significantly reducing the computation time.