[53739] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Network integrity and non-random removal of nodes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen Sprunk)
Fri Nov 22 10:34:50 2002
From: "Stephen Sprunk" <ssprunk@cisco.com>
To: "Sean Donelan" <sean@donelan.com>, "William Waites" <ww@styx.org>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 09:29:27 -0600
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Thus spake "William Waites" <ww@styx.org>
> I stand corrected.
>
> It would be interesting to see what outdegree looks like as a function
> of rank -- in the paper they give only the maximum and average
> (geo. mean) outdegrees. Is there also a critical point 25% of the way
> through the ranking? Probably not or one would expect they'd have
> mentioned it...
>
> So then the 12500 *biggest* routers have to be disabled before the
> graph breaks into many islands. This would be yet harder from an
> attacker's point of view, no?
Perhaps. What would happen if every public exchange went offline at the
same time? I think there's enough private connections in the DFZ to
maintain full connectivity, even if it might get a little slower.
Attacking carrier POPs would be a different matter. You can take all of
UUnet down by hitting the same number of buildings, but the addresses aren't
so easily discovered, and that's still only one carrier in one country.
However, all of this is still a relatively minor risk compared to the damage
that can be caused by simple human error.
S
