Do Not Complicate Routing Security with Voodoo Economics

Mon Sep 5 22:09:32 UTC 2011

> 
>> 3. I think the discussion on the list so far misses what I see as the central question about the economic assumptions in that paper.  The paper assumes that all destinations are equally valuable, which we know is not the case.  This implicitly (and perhaps mistakenly?) shifts the balance of power to tier-1 ISPs, whereas in practice, it may be with other ASes (e.g., Google).  In practice, ISPs may be willing to spend significant amounts of money to reach certain destinations or content (some destinations are more valuable than others... e.g., Google).  If the most "valuable" destinations deployed S-BGP and made everyone who wanted to connect to them deploy it, that would be more likely to succeed than the approach taken in the paper, I think.
> 
> Our paper does not assume all destinations are equally valuable.
> 
> 1) As mentioned in our response to Randy, we weight content
> providers more heavily  (see Section 6.8.1; we ran experiments where
> the content providers collectively source 10%, 20%, 33% or 50% of
> Internet traffic).
> 

The point here, however, is that the value is subjective. Not all content providers
are equally valuable. An access provider will get many complaints from users
if they are unable to reach some content providers (e.g. google) while they will
get relatively few complaints if they are unable to access others
(e.g. hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com).

Owen