Vulnerability Against Internet Disruptions - A Graph-Based Perspective

The Internet of today permeates societies and markets as a critical infrastructure. Dramatic network incidents have already happened in history with strong negative economic impacts. Therefore, assessing the vulnerability of Internet connections against failures, accidents and malicious attacks is an important field of high practical relevance. Based on a large integrated dataset describing the Internet as a complex graph, this paper develops a multi-dimensional Connectivity Risk Score that, to our knowledge, constitutes the first proposal for a topological connectivity-risk indicator of single Autonomous Systems, the organizational units of the Internet backbone. This score encompasses a variety of topological robustness metrics and can help risk managers to assess the vulnerability of their organizations even beyond network perimeters. Such analyses can be conducted in a user-friendly way with the help of CORIA, a newly developed software framework for connectivity risk analysis. Our approach can serve as an important element in an encompassing strategy to assess and improve companies’ connectivity to the Internet.

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