From a technical perspective, the Iran Air shootdown probably would not have happened, rather like Chernobyl, if there hadn't been humans in the loop overriding safeguards and making determinations of threats. In particular, if one wanted to look at a technical parallel that actually might be useful in network operations, part of the Iran Air disaster was that the decisions were all being made at one point, the ship that actually fired the missiles. Think centralized routing. Now, there's a military technique called Cooperative Engagement Capability that I liken to link state routing; it's a distributed computation model where each participating ship, radar aircraft, etc., gets the sensor information from the others, and the decisionmaking can become much more precise. In the Iran Air incident, at least one other U.S. ship had radar tracking on the airliner and was trying to warn that it was not a valid target. I'm saying this technically and from a standpoint of fault analysis avoidance, not politics. Just as the USS Vincennes' captain caused a disaster by deciding to fire on a very questionable target,
I'm not sure that this may not be veering into political OT, but, to the extent that proactive and automated reaction tools are being considered, even as benign as internal blackhole route generation, it may be worth discussing cases where, for various reasons, an automated defense system did not operate and people died. the USS Stark took missile hits because the captain had not turned on the missile defenses. The one SCUD hit in the Gulf War that caused major casualties was not engaged at all, apparently from a mixture of one radar being down for maintenance while the backup had not received a software patch to deal with a clock synchronization bug; the bug caused the radar to decide the incoming missile was an artifact and it was removed from the target list. Less seriously, my first reaction to Chertoff's statement is that the antiaircraft barrage already exists, is called Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3, which is sufficiently fanatical on my machine that its uninstaller committed suicide. -----Original Message----- From: Joel Jaeggli [mailto:joelja@bogus.com] Sent: Sunday, October 05, 2008 12:47 PM To: Tony Patti Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: cnn.com - Homeland Security seeks cyber counterattack system(Einstein 3.0) Tony Patti wrote:
I presume this CNN article falls within the "Internet operational and technical issues" (especially security) criteria of the NANOG AUP, in terms of "operat[ing] an Internet connected network", especially where Chertoff refers to " like an anti-aircraft weapon, shoot down an [Internet] attack before it hits its target".
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The system "would literally, like an anti-aircraft weapon, shoot down an attack before it hits its target," he said. "And that's what we call Einstein 3.0."