net disruptions through terrorist machinations

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Wed Oct 21 19:13:12 1998

Jim Strickland wrote:
> Gang, the tcp-ip protocol was designed to survive a nuclear war.

Packet-switching was invented by Paul Baran to provide a communications system
that could survive a nuclear war. IP is in principle is capable of being used
to implement such a system. However, there is nothing in IP that guarantees
that an IP-based internet will in fact be that robust.

The Internet as actually deployed is nowhere near sufficiently robust to
survive a nuclear war, or even a large-scale conventional war. While there
may not be single failure points that would be catastrophic, it would not take
the destruction of a very large percentage of backbone routers to take it
down. By "down", I don't mean a situation where no nodes can communicate
with other nodes. I mean a situation contrary to the normal experience in
which any node has a high likelyhood of being able to communicate with any
other node. The Internet isn't useful if you can only communicate with
an unpredictable subset of it.

> Assuming
> there is ANY connectivity going around a hypothetically disrupted/destroyed
> major network hub, the packets should find it.

If all of the connections truly were routing peers, that would be true. But
many of them aren't. If a single major peering point (or a few of them) were
destroyed, the net would still function, and within days would be back to
business as usual. If 20% of the peering points were destroyed, the net
wouldn't be usable (in the normal sense) for quite a while, possibly weeks.
Received on Wed Oct 21 1998 - 19:13:12 BST