  The various types of communication technologies and mobility features in
Internet of Things (IoT) on the one hand enable fruitful and attractive
applications, but on the other hand facilitates malware propagation, thereby
raising new challenges on handling IoT-empowered malware for cyber security.
Comparing with the malware propagation control scheme in traditional wireless
networks where nodes can be directly repaired and secured, in IoT, compromised
end devices are difficult to be patched. Alternatively, blocking malware via
patching intermediate nodes turns out to be a more feasible and practical
solution. Specifically, patching intermediate nodes can effectively prevent the
proliferation of malware propagation by securing infrastructure links and
limiting malware propagation to local device-to-device dissemination. This
article proposes a novel traffic-aware patching scheme to select important
intermediate nodes to patch, which applies to the IoT system with limited
patching resources and response time constraint. Experiments on real-world
trace datasets in IoT networks are conducted to demonstrate the advantage of
the proposed traffic-aware patching scheme in alleviating malware propagation.
