The Internet was created to survive a nuclear attack. It’s distributed, cooperative, and generally finds its way around breakpoints. The goal is for constant uptime, for everything to be accessible. For no choke points to stop the flow of traffic. To paraphrase the novel Dune: The data must flow.
Then we have choke points in DNS.
From this post, it seems that a minority of name servers serve a majority of domains. One outage that affects a portion of those, say all of Google’s name servers, would take down a good portion of the Internet (Eventually, one must have time out of cached results before this happens.) It’s not probable, but it’s possible.
Then in 2014 BGP routing was affected by 512K day, that is, the day the routing table finally became too big for some routers to handle quickly, causing slowdowns in the routers.
These aren’t the results of malicious actors, there’s no malware here. There’s just the usual actions of a distributed network that suddenly have points that could cause slowdowns, or worst case, outages. These are Digital Threats to the Internet.
Do we have other choke points we should be aware of? Other possibilities that can take down the distributed Internet?
Write about them for DTRAP. Tell us what these possibilities are and how we can mitigate them. Submit your paper to https://dtrap.acm.org/