The Impact of Imperfect Information on Network Attack

TL;DR

This study investigates how imperfect information affects the success of network attacks, revealing that certain attack strategies remain effective despite information errors, especially in scale-free networks.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of attack robustness under imperfect information across different network types, highlighting the varying impact of information errors.

Findings

Betweenness and dynamical importance attacks are robust to moderate information errors.

Attack effectiveness is less degraded in scale-free networks with information errors.

Missing links reduce attack effectiveness more than false links in Erdős-Rényi networks.

Abstract

This paper explores the effectiveness of network attack when the attacker has imperfect information about the network. For Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi networks, we observe that dynamical importance and betweenness centrality-based attacks are surprisingly robust to the presence of a moderate amount of imperfect information and are more effective compared with simpler degree-based attacks even at moderate levels of network information error. In contrast, for scale-free networks the effectiveness of attack is much less degraded by a moderate level of information error. Furthermore, in the Erd\H{o}os-R\'enyi case the effectiveness of network attack is much more degraded by missing links as compared with the same number of false links.