Out-of-band paging

Leo Bicknell bicknell at ufp.org
Wed Jul 28 14:42:30 UTC 2010


In a message written on Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 04:38:25PM +0200, Joel M Snyder wrote:
> But... you can take this sort of 'single point of failure' argument 
> almost as far as you want.  In the security business (where I spend most 
> of my time), I see people do this a lot--they get deep into the 
> ultra-ultra-ultra marginal risk, which takes then an enormous amount of 
> money to mitigate.  It's an easy rat hole to explore, and often fun.

I agree worring about the cell site is not the worry.

However I suspect many of the folks relying on SMS have no idea how
it works inside the carrier.  There are in fact other points of
failure that may be much more "single point".  For instance your
SMS likely passes through a database in the carrier network (in
case your phone is off).  That's redundant, right? Fully RAID'ed
and a hot standby spare and all that, after all it probably handles
SMS's for a few million customers.

Not always.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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