On New Approaches of Assessing Network Vulnerability: Hardness and Approximation

—Society relies heavily on its networked physical infrastructure and information systems. Accurately assessing the vulnerability of these systems against disruptive events is vital for planning and risk management. Existing approaches to vulnerability assessments of large-scale systems mainly focus on investigating inhomogeneous properties of the underlying graph elements. These measures and the associated heuristic solutions are limited in evaluating the vulnerability of large-scale network topologies. Furthermore, these approaches often fail to provide performance guarantees of the proposed solutions. In this paper, we propose a vulnerability measure, pairwise connectivity, and use it to formulate network vulnerability assessment as a graph-theoretical optimization problem, referred to as β-disruptor. The objective is to identify the minimum set of critical network elements, namely nodes and edges, whose removal results in a specific degradation of the network global pairwise con...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TON
• Authors: Thang N. Dinh, Ying Xuan, My T. Thai, Panos M. Pardalos, Taieb Znati
• Keywords: Heuristic Solutions, Network Vulnerability Assessment, NP Completeness, Programming Languages, TON 2012