Whether as telecommunications or power systems, networks are very important in everyday life. Maintaining these networks properly functional and connected, even under attacks or failures, is of special concern. This topic has been previously studied with a whole network robustness perspective,modeling networks as undirected graphs (such as roads or simply cables). This perspective measures the average behavior of the network after its last node has failed. In this article we propose two alternatives to well-known studies about the robustness of the backbone Internet: to use a supply network model and metrics for its representation (we called it the Go-Index), and to use robustness metrics that can be calculated while disconnections appear. Our research question is: if a smart adversary has a limited number of strikes to attack the Internet, how much will the damage be after each one in terms of network disconnection? Our findings suggest that in order to design robust networks it might be better to have a complete view of the robustness evolution of the network, from both the infrastructure and the users perspective.
On @cite_2 the impact of the effectiveness of the attack under observation error was studied. More recently @cite_6 studied sequential multi-strategy attacks using multiples robustness measures including the ( @math -index) @cite_9 .
@cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_2
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Terrorist attacks on transportation networks have traumatized modern societies. With a single blast, it has become possible to paralyze airline traffic, electric power supply, ground transportation or Internet communication. How and at which cost can one restructure the network such that it will become more robust against a malicious attack? We introduce a new measure for robustness and use it to devise a method to mitigate economically and efficiently this risk. We demonstrate its efficiency on the European electricity system and on the Internet as well as on complex networks models. We show that with small changes in the network structure (low cost) the robustness of diverse networks can be improved dramatically whereas their functionality remains unchanged. Our results are useful not only for improving significantly with low cost the robustness of existing infrastructures but also for designing economically robust network systems. We examine the robustness of networks under attack when the attacker sequentially selects from a number of different attack strategies, each of which removes one node from the network. Network robustness refers to the ability of a network to maintain functionality under attack, and the problem-dependent context implies a number of robustness measures exist. Thus, we analyze four measures: (1) entropy, (2) efficiency, (3) size of largest network component, and suggest to also utilize (4) pairwise connectivity. Six network centrality measures form the set of strategies at the disposal of the attacker. Our study examines the utility of greedy strategy selection versus random strategy selection for each attack, whereas previous studies focused on greedy selection but limited to only one attack strategy. Using a set of common complex network benchmark networks, in addition to real-world networks, we find that randomly selecting an attack strategy often performs well when the attack strategies are of high quality. We also examine defense against the attacks by adding k edges after each node attack and find that the greedy strategy is most useful in this context. We also observed that a betweenness-based attack often outperforms both random and greedy strategy selection, the latter often becoming trapped in local optima. Abstract : Identifying the key nodes to target in a social network is an important problem in several application areas, including the disruption of terrorist networks and the crafting of effective immunization strategies. One important issue that has received limited attention is how such targeting strategies are affected by erroneous data about network structure. This paper describes simulation experiments that investigate this issue.