The Net as Critical Infrastructure

There has been con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion over the last few days about Wired Magazine’s deci­sion to pub­lish a story detail­ing the inner work­ings of the Slam­mer worm. As more and more traf­fic moves over the Inter­net, the net­work is increas­ingly becom­ing a key ele­ment of the over­all global telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture, espe­cially now that com­pa­nies are start­ing to move tele­phone traf­fic over the net. Yet, most of the con­ver­sa­tion relat­ing to Inter­net secu­rity seems to focus on com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems, pit­ting Win­dows vs. Linux, gen­er­ally ignor­ing some of the poten­tial issues relat­ing to the lower lev­els of the net­work, namely routers. While I applaud Wired for dis­trib­ut­ing infor­ma­tion that will be use­ful in secur­ing win­dows servers in the future (their analy­sis of the Slam­mer worm showed how an attack can be per­formed), I was dis­ap­pointed that the story did not include any details as to how we can secure those impor­tant com­po­nents of the net. When cell phone net­works start com­ing off the map, we know we’ve got prob­lems. As more and more tele­com traf­fic moves over the net, what will be done to secure it? As we all know, the net has been based on a long-time sys­tem of open col­lab­o­ra­tion and shared trust. As the uni­verse of net users expands, we now have a full rep­re­sen­ta­tion of every char­ac­ter in soci­ety, includ­ing some of the more unsa­vory ones. That last group might have some inter­est in tak­ing down the net. With the emer­gence of Warhol Worms, the net is mov­ing for­ward into an era of poten­tially increas­ing sta­bil­ity. In April 2001, after Netscape took down the DTD for RSS, I said

We need to ensure redun­dancy across the net­work as a whole.

At the time, my com­ments were cen­ter­ing around the evo­lu­tion of a sin­gle for­mat. As the net moves for­ward, the same words can be applied to the wider spec­trum of pro­to­cols on the net. I dare hope that peo­ple will see this as a bat­tle cry to enhance our key infra­struc­ture. Oth­er­wise, the next time some­thing like the Slam­mer worm comes around, we may end up loos­ing more that 15% of net traf­fic; we may end up loos­ing access to a com­plete infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture that could include mobile phones, land lines, Inter­net access, and more.