[CII] Advocatus Diaboli

[Gadi Evron]

bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
>  howdy...
> 
> 	i challenge your lema that there exists a global Internet that can
> 	-unilaterally- fail, taking out all communications over IP.
> 

How about "might exist" or currently, take "some" rather than all?

	Gadi.


> --bill
> 
> 
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 11:37:59AM +0100, Felix 'FX' Lindner wrote:
>> Hi list,
>>
>> since the discussion about CI/CII exploded already into an
>> n-dimensional problem space, I would like to approach it from a
>> completely different angle and pose the following question as a
>> THOUGHT EXPERIMENT for discussion:
>>
>> ****************
>> Which governmental or commercial entity would be unable to recover
>> from a global and ongoing Internet outage?
>> ****************
>>
>> As we can define rules for thought experiements, here are the ones for
>> this:
>>
>> 1) 
>> We shall not know what the reason of the outage is. Simply assume
>> whereever you connect to the Internet, it simply doesn't work (no
>> routing, no DNS).
>>
>> 2) 
>> We shall assume that POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) is still
>> functioning. [Note: we all know that POTS cores are all VoIP these
>> days, but it's a thought experiment, so just play along] 
>>
>> 4) 
>> We shall assume that all other types or infrastructure are still
>> functioning, including power distribution, water and utilities.
>> [Note: we all know the argument that those may fail with Internet
>> outages, but it's a thought experiment, so just play along]
>>
>> 5)
>> How much of any localized networks will still work is up to the
>> participant of the thought experiment, but you shall reason why
>> something still works.
>>
>> Working hypothesis:
>> Any sufficiently important entity will apply creativity, priorization
>> and extra effort to get around the operational problems caused by the
>> unavailability of the Internet at large. The impact on societies and
>> their ability to support and protect human lives will be significantly
>> lower than commonly assumed.
>>
>> Goal of the thought experiment:
>> By identifying one or more entities that are unable to recover by any
>> means from a global and ongoing Internet outage, we might be able to
>> assess criticality of such entity, criticality of Internet components
>> as well as mitigation strategies that people would employ if forced to
>> using *actual*examples*.
>>
>> Enjoy,
>> FX
>>
>> -- 
>> Recurity Labs GmbH           | Felix 'FX' Lindner 
>> http://www.recurity-labs.com | fx at recurity-labs.com 
>> Wrangelstrasse 4             | Fon: +49 30 69539993-0
>> 10997 Berlin                 | PGP: A740 DE51 9891 19DF 0D05  
>> Germany                      |      13B3 1759 C388 C92D 6BBB
>> HRB 105213 B, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, GF Felix Lindner
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-- 
Gadi Evron,
ge at linuxbox.org.

Blog: http://gevron.livejournal.com/