Or you cut the lines coming into the city - i.e Chicago has about 5 diverse routes for fiber into the city. No explosives required and you get the same effect. ----- Original Message ----- From: Dave Israel <davei@algx.net> Date: Friday, September 13, 2002 10:52 am Subject: Re: Vulnerbilities of Interconnection
On 9/13/2002 at 10:30:47 -0400, alex@yuriev.com said:
Yet, it is reasonable that people expect x % of their
use IX's. If those IX"s are gone then they will need to find another path, and may need to upgrade alternate paths.
I guess the question is.
At what point does one build redundancy into the network.
No, it doesnt necessarily use IX's, in the event of there being no peered path across an IX traffic will flow from the originator to their upstream> > "tier1" over a private transit link, then that "tier1" will peer with the destination's upstream "tier1" over a private fat pipe then
destination via their transit private link.
I'm only aware of a few providers who transit across IX's and I think the consensus is that its a bad thing so it tends to be just small
the cost of the private link is relatively high.
I think you are missing a one critical point - IX in this case is not an exchange. It is a point where lots of providers have lots of gear in a highly congested area. However they connect to each other in
traffic to that will go to the people for whom that area does
not matter.
Now presume those areas are gone (as in compeletely gone). What is the possible impact?
They're all completely gone? Then we have a bigger issue than the Internet not working, because lots of us are dead. A lot of the exchange areas are city-wide, in a literal sense. Take DC, for example. Lots of folks connect in DC, not just at MAE-East, but also via direct cross-connects between providers, following a large variety of fiber paths owned by a variety of carriers. A single event that removed all the connectivity from DC would either have to devastate the city and surrounding suburbs, or at a minimum, distrupt electronics (EMP airburst) or hit every power plant in the area (and yeah, that kills folks, too, especially in winter.)
Now, having destroyed civilization in DC (so to speak), we have removed a major exchange point, but also all traffic generated in DC. The rest of the Internet is fine. To break the rest of the exchanges, we'd have to do the same to New York, Dallas, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, San Jose... And that's just in the States.
If you were to hit a telco hotel (usually a hard target, but we'll grant you the necessary firepower), you would inconvenience the Internet in that area until another well-connected site could be chosen and filled with equipment. Internet infrastructure is logically mapped to telco infrastructure, and telco infrastructure is ubiquitous. You're looking for a weakness where it isn't. If you wanted to hurt the Internet, you wouldn't hit a city. You'd hit the cross country fiber paths, out in the middle of nowhere.
-Dave
On Fri, 13 Sep 2002 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
Or you cut the lines coming into the city - i.e Chicago has about 5 diverse routes for fiber into the city. No explosives required and you get the same effect.
The early ideas for the arpanet/internet never said every point would work under all conditions. The premise was if you destroyed (which implies something is in fact destroyed) part of the network, the surviving parts of the network could function. It said nothing about the ability of the part of the network which was destroyed to function. It may be obvious the destroyed portion of the network will not function, but sales people don't always go out of their way to explain the concept. The Paradox of the Secrecy About Secrecy by Paul Baran, August 1964 [...] The overall problem here is highly reminiscent of the atomic energy discussions in the 1945-55 era--only those who were not cleared were able to talk about "classified" atomic weapons. This caused security officers to become highly discomfitured~by the ease with which unclassified clues were being combined to deduce highly accurate versions of material residing in the classified domain. This points up a commonly recurring difference of opinion (or philosophy) between the security officer and the technically trained observer. The more technical training an individual possesses, the less confidence he seems to have of the actual value of secrecy in protecting the spread of new developments in a ripe technology. True security does not always equate to blanket unthinking secrecy. While the security value of effective secrecy can be high, we must be realistic and acknowledge the constraints of living in a free society where effective secrecy in peacetime is almost impossible. Avoiding a touchy subject by falling back on edicts rather than rationality may automatically insure the continued existence of the touchy subject. [...]
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