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Guide to Disaster-Resilient Communication Networks pp 117–140Cite as

Comparing Destructive Strategies for Attacking Networks

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Part of the book series: Computer Communications and Networks ((CCN))

Abstract

The failures of multiple elements in a network can have disastrous consequences on its operation. Therefore, understanding the robustness of networks that experience multiple failures is utterly important. In this chapter, we review well-defined metrics related to the topology and resilience of the network and use them to analyze the robustness of real-world networks under multiple failures. We consider 52 real-world networks from three different infrastructure domains, namely metro networks, power grids and telecommunication networks. We quantify the impact of targeted node removals from a network on the relative size of the largest connected component of the network. Nodes are attacked according to traditional centrality metrics, such as degree, betweenness, closeness and the principal adjacency matrix eigenvector. In addition, we consider attacks based upon the recently proposed “zeta-vector”, that is the diagonal elements of the pseudo-inverse of the Laplacian matrix. Finally, we compare and rank these node-removal strategies and apply to the selected set of real-world infrastructures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    IEEE Power Systems Test Case Archive, available at: https://www2.ee.washington.edu/research/pstca/.

  2. 2.

    European power grids data set, available at: https://wiki.openmodinitiative.org/wiki/Transmission network data sets.

  3. 3.

    University of Girona, Network Robustness simulator, available at: http://nrs.udg.edu/.

  4. 4.

    In fact, given a network destroyed by the targeted attacks, the following question arises: “What is the best strategy to reconnect the attacked nodes to return to the initial topology?”, or, in other words: “In which order should the isolated nodes be reconnected?” In this reconstruction scenario, the robustness value of the network should increase as fast as possible.

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Acknowledgements

This chapter is based on work from COST Action CA15127 (“Resilient communication services protecting end-user applications from disaster-based failures—RECODIS”) supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The authors thank Dr. Carlos Natalino da Silva for his valuable comments and contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Hale Cetinay & Piet Van Mieghem

  2. Institute of Environmental Sciences, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Hale Cetinay

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Carmen Mas-Machuca

  4. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Girona, Girona, Spain

    Jose L. Marzo

  5. Centre for Research in Cyber Security, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore, Singapore

    Robert Kooij

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  1. Hale Cetinay
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  2. Carmen Mas-Machuca
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  3. Jose L. Marzo
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  5. Piet Van Mieghem
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Correspondence to Hale Cetinay .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Communications, Gdańsk University of Technology, Gdańsk, Poland

    Jacek Rak

  2. School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK

    David Hutchison

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Cetinay, H., Mas-Machuca, C., Marzo, J.L., Kooij, R., Van Mieghem, P. (2020). Comparing Destructive Strategies for Attacking Networks. In: Rak, J., Hutchison, D. (eds) Guide to Disaster-Resilient Communication Networks. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44685-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44685-7_5

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