Attack, defence and contagion in networks
Wednesday 1st October 2014
Review of Economic Studies
Goyal, S. and Vigier, A.
Connections between individuals facilitate the exchange of goods, resources, and information and
create benefits. These connections may be exploited by adversaries to spread their attacks as well. What
is the optimal way to design and defend networks in the face of attacks? We develop a model with a
Designer and an Adversary. The Designer moves first and chooses a network and an allocation of defence
resources across nodes. The Adversary then allocates attack resources on nodes; if an attack succeeds
then the Adversary decides on how successful resources should navigate the network. We obtain two
principal results. One, we show that in a wide variety of circumstances a star network with all defence
resources allocated to the central node is optimal for the Designer. Two, we identify conditions on the
technology of conflict, network value function, and the resource configuration for which networks with
multiple hubs/components are optimal.
Keywords
Conflict
Contagion
Cybersecurity
Epidemiology
Network defence
Network design
D74
D85
Themes
networks