Interesting People mailing list archives
VeriSign update -- some numbers
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 20:43:55 -0400
Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2003 17:29:55 -0700 (PDT) From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com> Subject: Re: [IP] VeriSign update To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Dave Farber wrote: > > At the same time, the VeriSign service triggered a huge increase in > > the amount of traffic flowing to the Mountain View, Calif., company's > > Web site, a portion of which may be the result of a hacker attack > > against the company, VeriSign said. I did a simple evaluation of the packet flow that a mistyped name previously engendered and what it does under Verisign's "sitefinder". I did a simple "GET" command, mimicing what a web browswer would do. In the old days, there would have been two to four packets to do the DNS query - two if the root delegation to .com or .net had already been cached in the user's computer, four packets if not. None of these packets would have gone to Verisign's web site. Now, there are those same two to four packets followed by A TCP connection with about 17K of data. Overall this TCP connection seems to consume on the order of 20 to 30 packets. All of these TCP packets go to Verisign's "sitefinder" web site. And if we use Verisign's estimate that there are 20,000,000 mistyped names a day, that means that they are getting on the order of 400,000,000 to 600,000,000 packets now per day that they didn't get before - all as a direct result of their own actions. And, of course, this additional packet burden is propogated onto the backs of ISPs that built their business models, support staffing, and link provisioning on the two-to-four packet model not the 30 packet model. I have heard estimates floating around on various mailing lists that Verisign expects to derive about $100,000,000 yearly revenue from this system. [As I see it, they are deriving this revenue by offloading a significant portion of the costs onto innocent third parties, particularly small ISPs that have thin profit margins already. --karl--
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- VeriSign update -- some numbers Dave Farber (Sep 17)