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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Internet FUD Abound
Agreed. For example, effecting availability of a few root nameservers alone would have an _interesting effect. No need to even attack the servers themselves, simply advertise more specifics of their address space (or the like). Just another subtle reminder that prefix-filtering (@ access and inter-provider -- at least well-known address space) could have a significant impact -- if/when this does occur. -danny > 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). > > >
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