Measuring Vulnerability of Complex Networks by Simulating DDoS Attacks

In this paper, the authors assess the vulnerability of different generic complex networks by measuring the throughput for networks with different load in presence of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are simulated by choosing a number of bot nodes using several measures, such as: random, degree centrality, eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality and k-medoids clustering algorithm. In order to obtain some information about the vulnerability of the three different complex networks (random, small-world and scale-free) they analyze the useful throughput of these networks in the presence of DDoS attack by the bot nodes.