I Accidentally the Whole Internet

TL;DR

This paper introduces new models and metrics for assessing Internet robustness, emphasizing real-time damage evaluation during attacks to improve network resilience strategies.

Contribution

It proposes a supply network model and dynamic robustness metrics, offering a novel perspective on Internet vulnerability analysis during targeted attacks.

Findings

Robustness can be better understood through real-time metrics during attacks.

A comprehensive view of infrastructure and user impact improves network resilience.

The proposed methods reveal the evolution of network damage under attack.

Abstract

Whether as telecommunications or power systems, networks are very important in everyday life. Maintaining these networks properly functional and connected, even under attacks or failures, is of special concern. This topic has been previously studied with a whole network robustness perspective,modeling networks as undirected graphs (such as roads or simply cables). This perspective measures the average behavior of the network after its last node has failed. In this article we propose two alternatives to well-known studies about the robustness of the backbone Internet: to use a supply network model and metrics for its representation (we called it the Go-Index), and to use robustness metrics that can be calculated while disconnections appear. Our research question is: if a smart adversary has a limited number of strikes to attack the Internet, how much will the damage be after each one in terms of network disconnection? Our findings suggest that in order to design robust networks it might be better to have a complete view of the robustness evolution of the network, from both the infrastructure and the users perspective.