Generic Attacks On Complex Networks

Robustness is an important research field of complex networks. Recently, error and attack tolerance of complex network research generally concluded that scale-free networks display a topological robustness against random node failures but fragile to intentional attacks. The most popular attack method is complete destruction of a selected target, while in the fact, the most part of attack can not achieve so ideal effect but cause partial damage of nodes or edges.We established a generic hit strategy model to represent the situation above. In the model, we add the edge's weight to attenuate network efficiency, and defined a continuous weight coefficientωto represent attack intensity, andωincrease continuously from 1 to infinity where 1 represents no attack and infinity represents complete destructive attack.We numerically studied the model under successive maximal damage method. The result shows that: with generic hit on the node, either on scale-free networks or random networks, when weight coefficient is very small, hit on two nodes could achieve the same damage with the elimination of a single selected node; while with generic hit on the edge, scale-free networks is much more frangible than random network.The damage causing by the generic hit was monitored by the network efficiency and the most attention part of network usually is the network transmission efficiency, such as Internet, WWW etc. Our studies are be propitious to help the maintenance of network, moreover, we can predict that the most potential and largest damage causing by the generic hit. Rely on this ,we can find out which node or edge having partial malfunction but causing a huge damage to the whole network.