Re: Future Impact of Viruses on Internet

[Daniel Medina <medina () COLUMBIA EDU>]

 What you're calling the future has happened, sort of.

 1) Now there are attacks and defenses.  People filter different things
on their networks, leading to fragmentation (How many people filtered
135?  445?  4444, 3127, and more?)

 2) *starts holding breath*  Hardware has been deployed which handles
SYN flood attacks, and so we see less of that now.

 3) Many LANs have experienced a substantial degredation of their
Internet access due to Slammer (high bandwidth, many packets, many
flows) and Welchia/Nachi (many flows).

 4) I think the attacks on the root DNS servers are pushing the move to
making them anycast (http://f.root-servers.org/).  This represents a
re-architecting.

 The paper "How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time"

        http://www.icir.org/vern/papers/cdc-usenix-sec02/

is still relevant.  The idea of a "Cyber CDC" is moving forward with the
new relationship between the Department of Homeland Security and CERT.

 This may not address any of the "what's being done technically to
harden end users?", but things like a smart firewall built-in to Windows
XP and the like are moving in the right direction.  Dropping most mail
attachment would help.  Disabling all servers upon shipment (IIS, SQL)
would help.  And so on...

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 10:55:17AM +1100, Tim Lane wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> just as a topic of interest for academic discussion, does anyone have a
> viewpoint on the potential likely future of the impacts of worms and
> viruses etc on the future of the Internet and its use?  As an example, I
> consider future scenarios could potentially be:
>
> 1) A continual and escalating situation of attack and defend (as is the
> case now);
> 2) An future implementation of technology that largely mitigates the
> seriousness of attacks rendering them of little concern;
> 3) A substantial and slow degredation of the Internet such that it becomes
> largely unusable;
> 4) A sudden enormous impact on the Internet that forces an almost total
> rebuild/re architecturing.
>
> If anyone has any thoughts I would be interested.  I am sure someone out
> there is involved in the development of a more robust Internet and is aware
> of likely future scenarios.

--
Daniel Medina

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