Points of Failure (was Re: National infrastructure asset)

Tue Sep 25 20:04:38 UTC 2001

On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

:But percentage of routes is just one way to measure "importance."
:It may not be the best way.  Other methods include
:
:   1. Number of stock options owned by Very Important People
:   2. CAIDA skitter traces of routers of confluence
:   3. Number of OC-192 links in a building
:   4. Number of "Tier 1" providers in a building
:   5. Government fiat
:   6. Wait for the building to fall down and see what happens

Is there a geometric method of measuring the 'meshedness' of a 
given set? If you take all the as-paths from a sampling of 
peers across the Internet, and show the relative density of 
where the respective paths converge, you can get a good picture
of who's transiting the most routes. 

Now this doesn't show physical connections, as an AS can represent
an area that spans continents, but it shows who is responsible, which 
in any DRP/BCP is among the first things established. 

:Assuming there are locations more impotant than others, should
:we do anything?  Or should we just hope no one else figures out
:where they are?

Well, the gov, or an industry consortium can find these
dense transit areas and require that organizations with (eg.)2 or more peers
have some semblance of a DRP/BCP plan that can be audited. The plan doesn't
nessecarily have to garuntee connectivity, but establish whether they
can be trusted to route packets if the DRP/BCP has to be initialized. 

After all, we are talking about the Internet, and though many orgs control
lots of different parts of the infrastructure, maybe a plan just for layer 3
might be worth persuing. 

So maybe a large percentage of traffic gets routed through 60 hudson, 
the providers that are located there would each have to have diverse enough
infrastructure/routing policies to contend with the unavailability of their
equipment at that facility, to qualify as an Infrastructure Carrier. 

In short, I think that a plan like this should start on ground we all know
and have the power to negotiate on, which is layer 3. 

--
batz
Reluctant Ninja
Defective Technologies