Maximization of network robustness considering the effect of escalation and accumulated experience of intelligent attackers

In this paper, we propose a mathematical programming model to describe a network attack scenario. In this problem, the attacker’s objective is to compromise multiple core nodes at minimum total attack cost. During the attack actions, the attacker may gain some experience from previous attacks to further reduce the attack costs in the future. Moreover, he can also pay extra fee to escalate his authority on a compromised node to get higher user privileges, so that he will have higher authority to access more information on the node. We measure the impact incurred by information leakage in our model, and adopt some Simulated Annealing-based algorithms to solve the problem.