Leo, On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
The only way to make sure a route was correct, everywhere, would be to have 39,000+ probes, one on every ASN, and check the path to the root server. Even if you had that, how do you define when any of the changes in 1-4 are legitimate? You could DNSSEC verify to rule out #1, but #2-4 are local decisions made by the ASN (or one of its upstreams).
I suppose, if someone had all 39,000+ probes, we could attempt to write algorythms that determined if too much "change" was happening at once; but I'm reminded of events like the earthquake that took out many asian cables a few years back. There's a very real danger in such a system shutting down a large number of nodes during such an event due to the magnitude of changes which I'd suggest is the exact opposite of what the Internet needs to have happen in that event.
This sounds an awfully lot like the notary concept: - http://perspectives-project.org/ - http://convergence.io/ Furthermore, changing network paths used to reach information probably should not be reason to shut down a service, in general. More interesting than which path is used, I suppose, is whether or not the data being returned has been changed in some unexpected/undesired way. Regards, Martin