Error and attack tolerance of complex networks

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: R. A. Hettinga <rah () shipwright com>

http://www.nd.edu/~networks/Papers/nature_attack.pdf

Error and attack tolerance of complex networks
Reka Albert, Hawoong Jeong & Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
Department of Physics, 225 Nieuwland Science Hall, University of Notre Dame,
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, USA

<....>

> In summary, we find that scale-free networks display a surprisingly high
> degree of tolerance against random failures, a property not shared by
> their exponential counterparts. This robustness is probably the basis of
> the error tolerance of many complex systems, ranging from cells 8 to
> distributed communication systems. It also explains why, despite frequent
> router problems 23, we rarely experience global network outages or,
> despite the temporary unavailability of many web pages, our ability to
> surf and locate information on the web is unaffected. However, the error
> tolerance comes at the expense of attack survivability: the diameter of
> these networks increases rapidly and they break into many isolated
> fragments when the most connected nodes are targeted. Such decreased
> attack survivability is useful for drug design 8, but it is less
> encouraging for communication systems, such as the Internet or the WWW.
> Although it is generally thought that attacks on networks with distributed
> resource management are less successful, our results indicate otherwise.
> The topological weaknesses of the current communication networks, rooted
> in their inhomogeneous connectivity distribution, seriously reduce their
> attack survivability. This could be exploited by those seeking to damage
> these systems.

----

See also:

http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/pajekman.htm which looks like
an interesting package for graphing complex network structures...


Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah () ibuc com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'



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