|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Internet FUD Abound
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).
|