nanog mailing list archives
Re: Internet FUD Abound
From: Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>
Date: 26 Jul 2000 13:36:00 -0700
On Wed, 26 July 2000, Andrew Bender wrote:
Another lapse in editorial integrity... this time, Reuters: http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/reuters/REU20000726S0007
The Reuters article skips over some of the important qualifiers in the Nature letter. Read the entire letter on the Nature website. http://www.nature.com/ The conclusions are interesting, but I think missing a few pieces of data. Every major public NAP has had service affecting incidents, and so far we have not seen the partioning effect Albert et al write about. I've also followed a fair number problems in the private connections, also without major network partion beyond those networks. Further, the source data from NLANR doesn't pick up every possible connection between networks. You should view source data as a floor(), not a ceil(), on the connectivity. And finally, coordinating a physical attack on more than a few physical locations is hard, even with perfect information. Of course, this is a false argument because it has never happened doesn't mean it can never happen. But I think its important to understand why such an attack is hard, as well as understanding why it is possible. On the other hand, there have been accidents (and perhaps some attacks) on the logical layer which have severely disrupted the Internet. The interesting thing about logical attacks is you don't need perfect information about the network because the critical points of the network almost act as natural gravity wells pulling the attack towards them (using a physical analogy in cyberspace).
Current thread:
- Internet FUD Abound Andrew Bender (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Randy Bush (Jul 26)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Sean Donelan (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Dan Hollis (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound David Charlap (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Scott Marcus (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound ww (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Vadim Antonov (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Danny McPherson (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Martin Cooper (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Sean Donelan (Jul 26)
- Re: Internet FUD Abound Jeremy Porter (Jul 26)