Recently came across the paper below on the Los ALamos site and it addresses a topic discussed earlier about how traffic is redistributed when a node is compromised. When the researchers included capacity loads in their equations they find some pretty severe consequences (3000 of 5000 disconnected by one nodal failure in the simulation), but the (real-world) analysis is done on the AS network and I believe there was talk of cascading failures not applying to the Internet in the first place. I was curious what assumptions the folks on NANOG would suggest if you were trying to model how traffic would be redistributed in the event of a node or mulitple node failure. Any input would be greatly appreciated. Cascade-based attacks on complex networks http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0301/0301086.pdf We live in a modern world supported by large, complex networks. Examples range from financial markets to communication and transportation systems. In many realistic situations the flow of physical quantities in the network, as characterized by the loads on nodes, is important. We show that for such networks where loads can redistribute among the nodes, intentional attacks can lead to a cascade of overload failures, which can in turn cause the entire or a substantial part of the network to collapse. This is relevant for real-world networks that possess a highly heterogeneous distribution of loads, such as the Internet and power grids. We demonstrate that the heterogeneity of these networks makes them particularly vulnerable to attacks in that a large-scale cascade may be triggered by disabling a single key node. This brings obvious concerns on the security of such systems.