Re: Internet FUD Abound

[ww]

>>>>> "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\