Please forgive me discussing diversity whilst replying with MS-Outlook. Yes, I understand the irony. > -----Original Message----- > From: davidat_private [SMTP:davidat_private] > Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 12:48 PM > To: BUGTRAQat_private > Subject: Re: Diversity > > Ian Carr-de Avelon wrote: > > Having differing IP stacks for a > packet to travel through increases the chances that malicious packets will > get trapped on one of them and the internal network remains protected. > [...] An amazing amount of > forethought has gone into the development of each flavor of *nix. > Different > theories are implemented in different stacks. Sometimes this has caused > problems, but overall it engenders a resilliency to faulting. > > Diversity can certainly be thought about. The open source model > encourages > program development. Many people writing differing versions of software. > Naturally this diversity means an exploit in one program is unlikely to be > found in another. > [Forbes, Thayne] Recently I was explaining to a youngster why the Internet Worm had been so damaging. To my mind there were two reasons. One, about two thirds of the net was using the two OS/applications that it targetted. (If I recall correctly, SUNos and VMS, Sendmail and fingerd). Not much diversity. Secondly, many/most organizations reaction to the incident was to disconnect from the net, forcing them to diagnose and correct the problem by themselves. Certainly we are seeing the first phenomomin again. I allude the the second as the result of an effective DoS attack on Cisco equipment. Frankly, I think David wildly underestimates the impact of a widespread Cisco problem. If major Cisco bug came out, your customers will complain due to the > widespread use of Cisco equipment. Not everyone uses Cisco however and > not > every Cisco machine is going to be reachable to crash. Some of your > customers wouldn't even notice, some of your customers would see a few > slow > or dropped sites. Some would find their favorite place unreachable. The > internet is an extremely diverse culture of equipment and people and short > of a humanitarian disaster, nothing is going to take the whole thing down. > >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 14:50:10 PDT