Robustness performance of the Internet connectivity under targeted attacks

Recent advances in scale free networks have claimed that their topologies are very weak against attacks. The inhomogeneous connectivity distribution of large-scale current communication networks, such as the Internet, could be exploited by evil hackers in order to damage these systems. However there have not been many studies on the approaches and consequences of such targeted attacks. In this paper, we propose an in-depth study of the Internet topology robustness to attacks at the network layer. Several attacking techniques are presented as well as their effects on the connectivity of the Internet. We show that although the removal of a small fraction of nodes can damage the Internet connectivity, such a node removal attack would still require a large amount of work to be carried out.