Worm Bandwidth [was Re: Santa Fe city government computers knocked out by worm]

Tue Nov 25 01:29:10 UTC 2003

On Monday, November 24, 2003, at 04:59 PM, jmalcolm at uraeus.com wrote:
> So, essentially, you are saying that the edges (customers, presumably)
> need to be bandwidth-limited to protect the core?

I wasn't advocating a solution, just observing the way things would 
have to be for worms to be purely a "buy a bigger box" problem (as I 
think Sean was suggesting if I didn't misunderstand him).

> This tends to happen
> anyway due to statistical multiplexing, but is usually not what the
> customers would want if they considered the question, and is not what
> ISPs want if they bill by the bit.

It would generally seem that ISPs would provide more downstream 
capacity than upstream, since this saves money and normally not all the 
downstream customers will use all their bandwidth at the same time.  
But a big worm could well break that last assumption.

So it would seem that worms are, at a minimum, not a simple or 
unproblematic capacity management problem.

Stuart.

Stuart Staniford, President                   		Tel: 707-840-9611 x 15
Silicon Defense - Worm Containment - http://www.silicondefense.com/
The Worm/Worm Containment FAQ: http://www.networm.org/faq/