Improving Robustness of Distributed Services (Re: DDoS attacks)

Sun Jul 15 08:33:01 UTC 2001

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Dickson, Brian wrote:

> - What is IRC, or for that matter net-news, at its heart? A transient,
> store-and-forward, one-to-many message system.
>
> In otherwords, multicast re-implemented on unicast, in some cases poorly and
> at great cost (news).

AFAIK, there is no implemented multicasting protocol - routing and reliable
transport - that can scale to the number of groups, senders and receivers
visible in current IRC networks.  Source-based trees would require the
order of 1E6 (S,G) pairs and core/RP-based routing would be an even easier
target for the SK's than IRC already is.

Achieving instant group messaging on a global scale with convential multicast
is unlikely.  Relevant academic research continues.

J