Spitballing IoT Security

Thu Oct 27 08:53:31 UTC 2016

On Thursday, 27 October, 2016 00:40, "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg at tristatelogic.com> said:

> Point:  I have a DSL line which is limited to 6Mbps down and 756Kbps up.
> My guess is that if any typical/average user is seen to be using more
> than, say, 1/10 of that amount of "up" bandwidth in any one given 10
> minute time period, then something is really really REALLY wrong.

This sounds like a horrible view of the Internet as "TV, only with more funny cat pictures", where most users are in a second-tier that is only expected / allowed to consume.

One of the reasons I'm very grateful for FTTC / VDSL is that I can finally get a useful upstream speed.  Going from 10-14M downstream to 80M was very nice, but going from 1M to 20M upstream was an absolute game-changer.

I back up to the cloud - and there are plenty of services that allow regular, non-technical users to do this.  The initial run saturated my upstream for days, and the incrementals are sometimes 20 or 30 minute bursts.  I wouldn't even have tried on ADSL.

Every time I get back from a day out, or even more so from a holiday, I upload the photos from my PC to one or more cloud services.  I'll max my uplink for anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour - on the old ADSL, it was easily an overnight task.

Working from home, I can now work directly with files on network shares, rather than copying everything to the laptop before I leave the office and trying to sync changes when I get back.  I know the exact figures for this case, but there are a *lot* of spikes over the course of a day.  With ADSL, I could go and make tea every time I needed to save a large Word doc or Powerpoint back to the network.  On top of that, I can spend anything up to 3 or 4 hours in videoconferences, which will have a steady stream of a few hundred Kb/s.

Spotting atypical (or ideally malicious) traffic is a valid goal, but I think we need to be a whole lot smarter than "customer is using upstream".

Regards,
Tim.