[30331] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Internet FUD Abound
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ww@shadowfax.styx.org)
Wed Jul 26 20:36:48 2000
From: ww@shadowfax.styx.org
To: Scott Marcus <smarcus@genuity.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 26 Jul 2000 19:30:46 EDT."
<3.0.5.32.20000726193046.0085dca0@pobox3.genuity.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 20:20:27 -0400
Message-Id: <20000727002027.D97D5745F@shadowfax>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
>>>>> "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\
