Social network analysis and simulation of the development of adversarial networks

We present a novel way to monitor and analyze the time course of adversarial networks through a simulation tool and supporting mathematical analysis. Recent work on social networks has been used in the analysis of adversarial networks and their underlying structure with hopes of detecting and preventing future activity. In this paper we consider an adversarial network to be a network subgroup that works against the interests of the group studying it. ANA, the software package presented here, can portray the structure of such networks and allow analysts to find patterns and key players in the network while watching the network evolve. Finally, this work uses output from ANA to study how a simulated adversarial scenario grows in structure and compares it to more traditional social networks on standard measures and also analyze the changes over time of this network on those same dimensions.