Growing Commercialization Threatens Net Security

dr3vil writes "The BBC is reporting that the concentration of the net's backbone in fewer hands has made it more vulnerable to attack. The report compares an attack to travel problems when traffic is disrupted at O'Hare. Hopefully someone in a position to act will pay attention."

Comments

Re:They do have a point...

[1984]

Depends. A telco has a network, which carries IP traffic (perhaps other traffic, too). That may or may not have multiple routes within it connecting any two points. And it may peer with other networks at various points. But it's not necessarily a given that a) if a big network disappears that there'll be routes *besides* that network connecting everything that was connected to it, or that if such alternatives exist, that they'll have sufficient bandwidth to cope with the loss of that network.

After all, it's notionally not economic to keep too much excess capacity around -- why bother? So it'd be a surprise if ever major route was 100% (or more) backed up by another major route.

Also, physical separation and logical separation are different. A large logical separation may, alas, boil down to two pieces of fiber in the same conduit, two wavelengths on the same piece of fiber, that sort of thing.

So yes, it *can* all be made to be redundant, but that's not neceesarily how it plays out. Other factors may act against redundancy.

Re:Why not get US in on this?

[sakeneko]

The government is the absolute antithesis of decentralization. Look at the heirarchy - if there's anything that public servants and the government structure as a whole is known for, it's a pecking order. Government doesn't understand decentralization....

The Internet was developed under the watchful guidance, and using the money, of none other than Uncle Sam -- the U.S. government. Way back in the early days of the ARPAnet, it was deliberately made decentralized, and designed to treat any blockage to the free flow of information as damage, to survive a nuclear attack.

Perhaps the government won't be willing to pay the bills to keep today's Internet from becoming overly centralized, but it knows how.

bad title

[asv108]

What does commercialization have to do with the Internet backbone being in fewer hands, shouldn't the title be "Growing Backbone Consolidation threatens Net Security. The last thing we need is G.W. thinking that their are comunists on slashdot. We will all be branded as terrorists.

Back in the good old days

[per unit analyzer]

The author of the article is waxing nostalgic about a day that never existed. Back in the NSFNET days (not the earliest days of the Internet but precommercialed nonetheless), if the NSS your regional network was connected to had problems, you would have had certainly felt it. Regional networks connected large swaths (several states) of the US to the Internet much like the author describes what is going on today. Eventually some regionals became multi-homed, but even then many were not designed to properly handle all traffic failing over to a single link to the backbone. I didn't start using the ARPAnet until it's final days, but even then I suspect the loss of a core site would isolate a number of leaf nodes.

The design of TCP/IP allows for redundancy and survivability, however most if not all of the research backbones that evolved into the commercialized Internet never had a great deal of redundancy. Granted, later incarnations like the NSFNET T3 network were better, but most had single points of failure which could be felt across large parts of the Internet when those points had problems...

--zawada