Optimal Network Destruction Strategy with Heterogeneous Cost under Cascading Failure Model

Abstract

By studying an attacker’s strategy, defenders can better understand their own weaknesses and prepare a response to potential threats in advance. Recent studies on complex networks using the cascading failure model have revealed that removing critical nodes in the network will seriously threaten network security due to the cascading effect. The conventional strategy is to maximize the declining network performance by removing as few nodes as possible, but this ignores the difference in node removal costs and the impact of the removal order on network performance. Having considered all factors, including the cost heterogeneity and removal order of nodes, this paper proposes a destruction strategy that maximizes the declining network performance under a constraint based on the removal costs. First, we propose a heterogeneous cost model to describe the removal cost of each node. A hybrid directed simulated annealing and tabu search algorithm is then devised to determine the optimal sequence of nodes for removal. To speed up the search efficiency of the simulated annealing algorithm, this paper proposes an innovative directed disturbance strategy based on the average cost. After each annealing iteration, the tabu search algorithm is used to adjust the order of node removal. Finally, the effectiveness and convergence of the proposed algorithm are evaluated through extensive experiments on simulated and real networks. As the cost heterogeneity increases, we find that the impact of low-cost nodes on network security becomes larger.