New Link Attack Strategies of Complex Networks Based on <i>k</i>-Core Decomposition
Shiwen Sun, Xiaoxiao Liu, Li Wang, Chengyi Xia
Abstract
K-core decomposition has been regarded as a useful method to characterize and analyze topological properties of complex systems, and, the study on network attack remains as a hot topic. In this brief, based on k-core decomposition, new measurements of link importance are presented. Accordingly, new link attack strategies based on link shell are proposed. Through numerical simulations, different attack strategies are adopted on real-world networked system s and random networks. Compared to link attack based on betweenness centrality, which is considered as the most effective strategy so far, shell-max attack is found to have even better performance in most networks. However, the computational complexity of link shell is much lower than that of betweenness centrality especially for large-scale networks. Thus, shell-max strategy can be used as a potential candidate to effectively destroy large-scale networked systems. Current results can help to illuminate the fundamental connection between attack robustness and underlying structures of complex systems.