"Scott" == Scott Marcus <smarcus@genuity.com> writes:
Scott> I agree with Sean that the article itself is an interesting Scott> read. In fact, I'd say it's better than I expected based on Scott> the Reuters report. A key conclusion -- that elimination Scott> of a random 2.5% of the routers of the Internet would cause Scott> little harm, but elimination of the most central 2.5% of Scott> the routers would at least triple the diameter of the Scott> network -- is likely correct. (Although I don't think we Scott> needed fancy mathematics to tell us that. ;^) Scott> Sean, I don't think that they were arguing that EVERY Scott> failure would cause this kind of collapse. They were Scott> saying that a scale-free system might be particularly Scott> vulnerable to a systematic attempt to cripple its most Scott> critical elements. A failure of a single public NAP is Scott> probably well below that threshhold. True, although I wonder how the graph would look if only the most connected (say with >= 5 peers) ASs were considered. I suspect such a graph would be fairly well meshed and so might approximate an exponential network rather than a scale-free one. In that case I imagine that the threshold would be nearer 30% than 3%. That is, a targeted attack would have to disable close to a third of the largest ASs on the internet. -w -- Will Waites \________ ww@shadowfax.styx.org\____________________________ Idiosyntactix Ministry of Research and Development\