I completely agree with statement. It is not a matter of wanting to
know where the importants hubs are - we have a pretty good handle on
that, but what the impacts would be of a hub loss from an operational
stand point. Maybe this is a discussion that needs to be off-line.
My goal is to provide some context and validation for the research
that is being carried out.
There have been some interesting discussion on this forum about multi-
provider cooperation in case of emergencies/catastropes. Your
suggestion of the creation of a directory for contacts across
providers was an insightful addition. I believe more discussion along
these lines would be of benefit. The desire is for something high
level, not any network details that could prove compromising.
:I completely agree with statement. It is not a matter of wanting to
:know where the importants hubs are - we have a pretty good handle on
:that, but what the impacts would be of a hub loss from an operational
:stand point. Maybe this is a discussion that needs to be off-line.
:My goal is to provide some context and validation for the research
:that is being carried out.
The vulnerability is relative to the priority and value of the asset
being protected. Without definition of those assets from the government,
or whatever stakeholder needs to know, it is difficult to explain.
Operationally, you can talk about various meet-me points, hubs, exchanges
and routes as being critical, but the sites those links service will be
the metric by which their importance is measured.
Until our various political masters decide what sites they think are
truely critical, any assessment will be relative to shifting priorities
of participants in the discussion.
Who is more critical; Nasdaq, Google, WCOM or the GSA? You can see
how this becomes relative pretty quickly.
I don't know about that statement. There may be some super-secret list
of the most critical locations which I'm not privy too. However most of
the lists I've seen suffer from brand-name bias. They have well known
locations, which is not necessarily the same as the critical locations.
And as others have pointed out, a lot depends on what services you define
to be critical.
The Internet is a non-linear system. The impact of a loss of a hub or
even many hubs doesn't depend so much on the hub, but on what else is
happening in the network. The Internet is "failing" all the time, all
day and all night. Why don't we notice most outages? What causes a
disruption to grow large enough to impact lots of people?