Re: Internet is rickety

Kriston J. Rehberg (kriston@ibm.net)
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 00:48:47 -0400

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Not to be a bully, or further move the topic away from crypto coding,
but the whole idea that the internet was "designed to be extremely
robust in the fact of adverse conditions (originally it was nuclear
attack)" has been proven in various literature to be patently false.
It's certainly a good story but in the tradition of urban legends, that
story would be more properly labelled "Fb", meaning that it's "false but
believed to be true."

Enjoy,

Kris

Alex Alten wrote:
>
> Bruce,
>
> You are making it sound worse than it is. The underlying network
> routing infrastructure is designed to be extremely robust in the face
> adverse conditions (originally it was nuclear attack). I'm only aware
> of two incidents that actually ground large parts of the Internet to a
> halt. The 1st involved a bug in the backbone rounters when the Internet
> was young and had relatively few nodes. The 2nd was the Morris worm
> which effected primarily Unix computers running Sendmail with a backdoor
> function turned on. Even in that case many of the disconnections were
> done voluntarily until the worm was eliminated. Today there is a much
> wider variety of software and hardware running on the Internet making it
> very difficult for denial of service or other types of attacks to
> succeed on a vast scale. For example a Morris worm attack would have
> to target Exchange as well as Sendmail to even have a hope of moderate
> success today. An attack on an individual host machine to gather
> passphrases or insert malicious web pages, etc., may be easy to do,
> especially if no proper attempt has been made to harden the site.
> However it is not equivalent to bringing down the Internet.
>
> - Alex
>
> At 06:17 PM 8/10/98 -0500, Bruce Schneier wrote:
> >See my editorial:
> >
> > http://www.mercurycenter.com/premium/business/docs/hotbutton09.htm
> >
> >Bruce
>
> --
>
> Alex Alten
>
> Andrade@Netcom.Com (home--old)
> Alten@Home.Com (home--new)
> Alten@TriStrata.Com (work)
>
> P.O. Box 11406
> Pleasanton, CA 94588 USA
> (510) 417-0159

-- 
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
AOL: Kriston                    endeavor to persevere
ICQ: 3535970

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