A Flow Attack Strategy based on Critical Links for Cyber-attack

Abstract

Whether it be congestion control in cities or massive access in the Internet, these dynamic behaviors can be abstracted as flow demand between origin-destination node pairs (OD pairs) in the network. Links in complex systems are with notable heterogeneity, which means the volume of flow varies greatly, resulting in some critical links being more likely to congest under the flow attack, reducing the service capability of the system, and even causing network collapses. To explore how flow dynamics influences the network functionality and stability under congestion, we propose a link-based flow attack strategy that significantly degrades the service capability between OD pairs. In this approach, we first extract the routing paths and score the vulnerability of links between OD pairs, then an attack flow allocation rule based on critical links is designed to efficiently attack the target flow between OD pairs. Experiments on real-world networks show that the proposed strategy can quickly identify critical links and accurately attack the target flow. Besides, the proposed method provides positive and unique insights for defense strategy and network topology optimization.