Tolerance of intentional attacks in complex communication networks

Motivated by recent developments in the theory of complex networks, we examine the tolerance of communication networks for intentional attacks that aim to crash the network by taking down network hubs. In addition to providing a brief survey of key existing results, we investigate two different effects that largely have been ignored in past studies. Many communication networks, such as the Internet, are too large for anyone to have global information of their topologies, which makes accurate, intentional attacks virtually impossible; most attacks in communication networks must propagate from nodes to adjacent nodes, utilizing local-network topology information only. We show that incomplete global information has a different impact on intentional attacks in different circumstances, and local information-based attacks can actually be highly efficient. Such insights will be helpful for the future development of efficient protection schemes against network attacks.