Chapter 8 Combinatorial attack analysis
One way of identifying the importance of a node is to quantify the tolerance of the network to node removal. A measure of overall network connectivity, and hence function, is the size of the largest connected, or "giant" component. The effect of node removal can be defined in terms of the fraction of network nodes disconnected from the giant component after node removal, a measure that we call attackness
. Thus, removal of a node with high attackness results in a large proportion of disconnected nodes. The measure of attackness can be extended to multiple nodes for the removal, assessing the effect of such removal on the fraction of network nodes disconnected from the giant component (i.e. combinatorial attackness
).