Fort N.O.C.'s Security in Obscurity

penciling_in writes "Brock N. Meeks of MSNBC reports on his recent visit to VeriSign's secret location: 'The unassuming building that houses the "A" root sits in a cluster of three others; the architecture looks as if it were lifted directly from a free clip art library. No signs or markers give a hint that the Internet's most precious computer is inside humming happily away in a hermetically sealed room. This building complex could be any of a 100,000 mini office parks littering middle class America.' The report goes on to say: 'Access to the Network Operations Center, the "NORAD" of the Internet's traffic monitoring, requires the electronic badge and then a double biometric hand print scan.' And here are Karl Auerbach and Robert Alberti offering their interesting analysis of this report on CircleID."

Comments

LINUX Analogy

[YukioMishima]

This story is news, but I kept expecting some point of contention in the article, rather than some musings on decorating schemes that were compared to clip art.

I found my point here:

The root server operators "have no contract with anyone, no guarantee of level of service, they could turn [the root servers] off tomorrow with no consequences at all because they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart," said Internet consultant Ambler. "ICANN needs contracts with the root server operators that specify minimum levels of service and minimum levels of security and the root servers need to be paid for that," he said.

Why is it so confusing to imagine that (a) People do like to do things out of the "kindness" of their collective hearts, and (b) security is not always "secured" by either contracts or money? I understand the legal protections associated with contracts, but I think there's a chance that the root server operator system, as it stands, could alternatively be viewed as something successful - something, much like the open source software movement, that works, not because of contracts or restrictive covenants, but because people enjoy contributing to something useful for their own and others' use.

nobody cared about security two years ago?

[kilbo]

"But Ambler nearly chokes on the word 'defense' noting that 'up until two years ago nobody gave a rat's ass for security of the root servers because if the Internet went down it would have been an annoyance to some researchers and nerds.'"

I guess amazon.com which went public in 1997 must have been frequented only be researches and nerds for the first 5 years of operation.