Re: Vulnerbilities of Interconnection
Sean, I completely agree with statement. It is not a matter of wanting to know where the importants hubs are - we have a pretty good handle on that, but what the impacts would be of a hub loss from an operational stand point. Maybe this is a discussion that needs to be off-line. My goal is to provide some context and validation for the research that is being carried out. There have been some interesting discussion on this forum about multi- provider cooperation in case of emergencies/catastropes. Your suggestion of the creation of a directory for contacts across providers was an insightful addition. I believe more discussion along these lines would be of benefit. The desire is for something high level, not any network details that could prove compromising. Thanks, sean ----- Original Message ----- From: Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> Date: Thursday, September 5, 2002 12:48 pm Subject: Re: Vulnerbilities of Interconnection
very much like to avoid doing the research in a vaccuum. I was hoping> a discussion on NANOG wold be a good first step. The
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote: project is quite
hot with the politicos and I very much want to make sure to best recommendations are made. Formal industrsy cooperation is one side of this, but I think a lot of information can be gained from an informal> approach as well. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated
http://www.infosecuritymag.com/2002/sep/2002survey/voices/verylarge.sht ml
On security reporting... "Since Sept. 11, state, local and federal authorities have tried to get their arms around the potential threats to the nation's infrastructure--including the telecommunications infrastructure. They have asked us questions like, 'What are your 100 most vulnerable places in the network?'"
"As much as we would like to help the government in its attempt to helpus, we believe it would be counterproductive to share such informationwidely because if it were released, it would provide a terrorist with a roadmap to our key locations. Unless the government agrees that it
can
protect our information, we will continue to respectfully decline such blanket requests."
Bill Smith CTO and President of Interconnection Services, BellSouth
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote: :I completely agree with statement. It is not a matter of wanting to :know where the importants hubs are - we have a pretty good handle on :that, but what the impacts would be of a hub loss from an operational :stand point. Maybe this is a discussion that needs to be off-line. :My goal is to provide some context and validation for the research :that is being carried out. The vulnerability is relative to the priority and value of the asset being protected. Without definition of those assets from the government, or whatever stakeholder needs to know, it is difficult to explain. Operationally, you can talk about various meet-me points, hubs, exchanges and routes as being critical, but the sites those links service will be the metric by which their importance is measured. Until our various political masters decide what sites they think are truely critical, any assessment will be relative to shifting priorities of participants in the discussion. Who is more critical; Nasdaq, Google, WCOM or the GSA? You can see how this becomes relative pretty quickly. -- batz
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
I completely agree with statement. It is not a matter of wanting to know where the importants hubs are - we have a pretty good handle on that, but what the impacts would be of a hub loss from an operational
I don't know about that statement. There may be some super-secret list of the most critical locations which I'm not privy too. However most of the lists I've seen suffer from brand-name bias. They have well known locations, which is not necessarily the same as the critical locations. And as others have pointed out, a lot depends on what services you define to be critical. The Internet is a non-linear system. The impact of a loss of a hub or even many hubs doesn't depend so much on the hub, but on what else is happening in the network. The Internet is "failing" all the time, all day and all night. Why don't we notice most outages? What causes a disruption to grow large enough to impact lots of people?
participants (3)
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batz -
Sean Donelan -
sgorman1＠gmu.edu