Our esteemed friends at The Register are reporting on how a hoax email caused large numbers of people to flood the switchboard of their local police.
This illustrates a phenomenon of “media bleed”, where the attributes of one medium overflow to pollute or enhance another. In this case, the anonymous nature of email has bypassed the anti-abuse features of the PSTN.
Microsoft’s Athena project seeks to hook PCs into the PSTN as your communications hub. This could have some interesting consequences. What if the next round of Slammer-style worms co-ordinate to take down the PSTN? The smart network with dumb endpoints previously relied on a smart human picking up the phone before a call could be made. But a smart network with smart endpoints could prove a lethal combination, because the smart network was never built with suitable protection from mass-scale autodialling. PBXs have survived through security-by-obscurity and diversity of the infrastructure. Only a small number of phreakers have taken the time to hack them, and there are so many models and configurations it’s too hard to build an effective worm. Plus the voice communications network itself is too weak for effective worm self-replication. Windows + PSTN changes all that.
The irony of 9/11 style events is to highlight the all-or-nothing nature of the PSTN. The capacity of the PSTN in New York was reduced, and the users effectively achieved a distributed denial of service attack on themselves via the limited spectrum and switching resources. On a pure packet network the voice codec would have adapted downwards; calls would have become shortened to the bare minimum necessary to communicate. After that, it would have degraded to high-latency push-to-talk or IM applications. Finally, it would have only offered pure store-and-forward such as email. But the abaility to communicate would automatically have scaled with the capacity of the network.
So the second-strike capability of the Internet to withstand nuclear attack isn’t necessarily just about preserving network connecivity. It’s about preserving application connectivity. And despite the boasting of five-9s reliability of the traditional telcos, then push comes to shove the PSTN is increasingly failing to live up to the task.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:08 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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There was a similar thing caused by a Dave Barry column on telemarketers and do not call list.
Original column: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/6649728.htm
Result: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/dave_barry/6934584.htm
Posted by: at December 8, 2003 11:46 PM