Scientists spot Achilles heel of the Internet
Updated 2:29 PM ET July 26, 2000
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - The complex structure of the Internet makes it
resistant to errors or failure but is also its Achilles heel, scientists in the
United States said Wednesday.
Because the system is so varied, if one or more nodes --- the crossroads
through which Internet data travel -- go down, it has very little impact.
But researchers at Notre Dame University in Indiana, who have analyzed
the connections within the Internet, have found that if the networks with
the most highly connected nodes were attacked by cyber-terrorists it
could fragment the Web into isolated parts.
"The Achilles heel (of the Internet) is that the structure has this double
feature. Like Achilles it is very hard to kill it, but if you know something
about the system then you could," Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, a structural
physicist, said in a telephone interview.
An estimated 3 percent of nodes are down at an given time but no one
notices because the system copes with it.
"The reason this is so is because there are a couple of very big nodes and
all messages are going through them. But if someone maliciously takes
down the biggest nodes you can harm the system in incredible ways. You
can very easily destroy the function of the Internet," he added.
TOPOLOGY OF INTERNET SIMILAR TO US AIRLINE NETWORKS
Barabasi, whose research is published in the science journal Nature,
compared the structure of the Internet to the airline network of the
United States.
The majority of airports are small but they are all connected to much
larger hubs -- cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, New York and Los
Angeles.
"That's exactly the situation on the Internet: there are a couple of hubs
that are crucial to the system," he explained.
Those big hubs or nodes control the traffic in the system.
If the Internet hubs are taken out simultaneously, there would be a
serious problem, but Barabasi said the probability of random errors
hitting the big nodes was very small.
In a commentary on the research, Yuhai Tu of the IBM T.J. Watson
Research Center in New York said the research was a first step toward
understanding the robustness of the Internet.
"The good news is that we do not have to worry about random
fluctuations of these networks. The bad news is that Internet terrorists
could cause great damage by targeting the most connected router," he
said.
