Re: Internet shutdown Feb 29?

[Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>]

On Sun, 25 Feb 1996, Jeffrey I. Schiller wrote:

> 
> Yeah, from several of ISP's and others (including one un-named government
> organization that wanted to FAX us the message, for security reasons,
> didn't want to send it over the network).
> 

As a matter of interest, I wonder how much of the internet could be 
shut down by concerted effort; obviously individual services can be 
trivially disabled by jamming listen queues (not really stoppable by 
anything short of IPSEC w/photuris). The BGP backbone could probably be 
disabled from within by a traitor planted in one of big companies, and a 
confused backhoe around the MAEs could probably do a lot more damage than 
people would like to admit. It seems that the internet is getting pretty 
brittle- I wonder if it would be worthwhile having some sort of infranet 
with a bunch of backups links using dial-up lines or spare transponders 
(with a filter to block port 80 :-)

It's probably not possible with  todays routing technology 
(slow, flappy links with nightmarish convergence times), plus it's not 
sexy like a nice OC-12 SONET. This is the sort of thing the NCSC should 
be working on- something to keep the essential services flowing in the 
early stages of an info-war, or an info truck-bomb




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