The Impact of Imperfect Information on Network Attack

Abstract

This paper explores the effectiveness of network attack when the attacker has imperfect information about the network. For Erdős-Rényi 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 Erdőos-Rényi case the effectiveness of network attack is much more degraded by missing links as compared with the same number of false links.