Tolerance of Local Information-Based Intentional Attacks in Complex Networks

We study the tolerance of complex networks against intentional attack which takes down network nodes in a decreasing order of their degrees. Specifically, we evaluate an effect which has been largely ignored in existing studies: in many real-life systems such as communication networks, attacks typically propagate throughout the networks from compromised nodes to their adjacent nodes, utilizing at most local network-topology information. By theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, we show that though different local information-based attacks have different performances, generally speaking they can be highly efficient. Such insight shall be helpful for the future developments of efficient network attack and protection schemes. Index Terms — Complex network, scale-free network, network robustness, intentional attack, distributed attack.