Cascade-based attacks on complex networks.

By Adilson E. Motter, Ying-Cheng Lai. Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics, 2002

1,776 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We live in a modern world supported by large, complex networks. Examples range from financial markets to communication and transportation systems. In many realistic situations the flow of physical quantities in the network, as characterized by the loads on nodes, is important. We show that for such networks where loads can redistribute among the nodes, intentional attacks can lead to a cascade of overload failures, which can in turn cause the entire or a substantial part of the network to collapse. This is relevant for real-world networks that possess a highly heterogeneous distribution of loads, such as the Internet and power grids. We demonstrate that the heterogeneity of these networks makes them particularly vulnerable to attacks in that a large-scale cascade may be triggered by disabling a single key node. This brings obvious concerns on the security of such systems.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Control and Systems Engineering, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d8c8bcb08ef27b860ae08aae205abc274862b2c

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Citations in the corpus

Strategic Protection Against Data Injection Attacks on Power Grids (2011, background): “, buses that have large numbers of incident branches, because the failure of one of those nodes has significant potential of causing cascading failure of the whole grid [16].”
Dynamically induced cascading failures in power grids (2017, background): “This is di erent from the de nition of a relative capacity, C̃ij := (1 + α)Fij (0), which has been commonly adopted in the literature [10, 27, 51].”
Cascade-based attack vulnerability on the US power grid. (2009, background): “Thus, it is natural to assume that the capacity C j of a node j is proportional to its initial load (Wu et al., 2008; Motter and Lai, 2002; Crucitti et al., 2004; Wang and Chen, 2008; Zhao and Gao, 2007; Sun et al., 2008; Motter, 2004; Wang et al., 2008; Wang and Rong, 2008; Zhao et al., 2004,…”
Bipartite Graphs as Models of Complex Networks (2003, methodology): “…model generally used before this discovery, although they play a central role in many contexts like the robustness of the Internet [6, 15, 19, 20, 49], the spread of viruses or rumors over the Internet, the Web or other social networks [48, 52, 58], the performance of protocols and algorithms…”
The Power Grid as a Complex Network: a Survey (2011, methodology): “The vulnerability analysis performed by Sun [55] is actually a description of results obtained by other studies (e.g., [67, 57, 71, 72]) on Complex Networks and Power Grid studies on the behavior of networks under failures of nodes or edges.”
Layered complex networks. (2005, background): “Indeed, many authors take betweenness as a measure of load either directly [23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28], or with slight modiﬁca-tions [6, 29, 30] In Fig.”
The Structure and Function of Complex Networks (2003, neutral): “[296, 297], and by Motter and Lai [304].”
Identifying influential nodes in complex networks (2012, background): “It is well-known that many mechanisms such as cascading, spreading, and synchronizing are highly affected by a tiny fraction of influential nodes [6–11].”