Attacking the Core Structure of Complex Network

Bibliographic Data

ID22107279
AuthorsBo Zhou (0009-0002-9984-1557, Zhejiang Institute of Communications), Yuqian Lv (0009-0005-1909-9965, Zhejiang University of Technology), Jinhuan Wang (0000-0001-9348-3424, Zhejiang University of Technology), Jian Zhang (0000-0001-7681-8747, Zhejiang University of Technology), Qi Xuan (0000-0002-1042-470X, Peng Cheng Laboratory)
Year2023
Volume10
Issue4
Pages1428-1442
Publication date2023-08-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2329-924X • E-ISSN: 2373-7476
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1109/tcss.2022.3188522
OpenAlexW4285196494
LanguageEN
References cited50

The concept of $k$ -core in complex networks plays a key role in many applications, e.g., understanding the global structure or identifying central/critical nodes, of a network. A malicious attacker with a jamming ability can exploit the vulnerability of the $k$ -core structure to attack the network and invalidate the network analysis methods, e.g., reducing the $k$ -shell values of nodes can deceive graph algorithms, leading to the wrong decisions. In this article, we investigate the robustness of the $k$ -core structure under adversarial attacks by deleting edges, for the first time. First, we give the general definition of the targeted $k$ -core attack, map it to the set cover problem, which is NP-hard, and further introduce a series of evaluation metrics to measure the performance of attack methods. Then, we propose the $Q$ index theoretically as the probability that the terminal node of an edge does not belong to the innermost core, which is further used to guide the design of our heuristic attack methods, namely, COREATTACK and GreedyCOREATTACK. The experiments on a variety of real-world networks demonstrate that our methods behave much better than a series of baselines, in terms of much smaller edge change rate (ECR) and false attack rate (FAR), achieving state-of-the-art attack performance. More impressively, for certain real-world networks, only deleting one edge from the $k$ -core may lead to the collapse of the innermost core, even if this core contains dozens of nodes. Such a phenomenon indicates that the $k$ -core structure could be extremely vulnerable under adversarial attacks, and its robustness, thus, should be carefully addressed to ensure the security of many graph algorithms. An open-source implementation is available at https://github.com/Yocenly/COREATTACCK

Algorithm · Arithmetic · Discrete mathematics · Network topology · Notation · Advanced Graph Neural Networks · Complex Network Analysis Techniques · Computer Science · Graph theory and applications · Mathematics

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