How to efficiently destroy a network with limited information

TL;DR

This paper investigates efficient network destruction strategies under limited information, demonstrating that removing acquaintances of randomly chosen nodes is optimal through cost-benefit analysis.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes the acquaintance removal strategy as an optimal method for network destruction with minimal prior information.

Findings

Acquaintance removal outperforms other strategies in network destruction efficiency.

Cost-benefit analysis supports acquaintance removal as the optimal approach.

The method requires limited information about network structure.

Abstract

We address the general problem of how best to attack and destroy a network by node removal, given limited or no prior information about the edges. We consider a family of strategies in which nodes are randomly chosen, but not removed. Instead, a random acquaintance (i.e., a first neighbour) of the chosen node is removed from the network. By assigning an informal cost to the information about the network structure, we show using cost-benefit analysis that acquaintance removal is the optimal strategy to destroy networks efficiently.