Russia's high AS complexity (score 19.39, 2,346 ASes) enabled the Russian Business Network to hide malware-hosting ASes by chaining traffic through multiple intermediate legitimate-seeming ASes, making connections very difficult to trace and sever. The paper concludes that higher national AS complexity directly raises the operational cost of enumerating and cutting any given connection.
From 2011-roberts-mapping — Mapping Local Internet Control
· §IV, §VI
· 2011
· Computer Communications Workshop
Implications
In high-complexity networks, multi-hop relay architectures that route through chains of intermediate ASes gain structural camouflage from the density of legitimate traffic paths — a property to exploit when selecting relay topologies in Eastern Europe.
Before deploying relay infrastructure, compute AS-level complexity for candidate jurisdictions; countries with higher complexity scores impose higher enumeration costs on censors attempting to block the relay network.