Software Engineering
Ermack B. Verzel June 26, 2013
Assignment Software Engineering
1. As software becomes more pervasive, risks to the public (due to faulty programs) become an increasingly important concern. Develop a realistic doomsday scenario where a failure of a computer program could do great harm (endanger human life or economies).
Tech doomsday scenario: The Net goes down
News flash: The Internet melted down today as millions of Web surfers found themselves redirected to the wrong sites, thanks to problems with the domain name server system.
Can the Internet be taken offline? Many experts scoff at the idea, citing too many diverse communications channels, too many redundancies, and architecture designed to route around failures.
"I think it would be very difficult to take down the whole Internet, unless you had a worldwide EMP event that takes everything else down as well," says Dr. Ken Calvert, chair of the University of Kentucky's Department of Computer Science. "At all levels you have diversity of technology carrying the bits, whether it's satellite, fiber, or wireless. There's a lot of redundancy there."
Yet even if the Net can't be entirely shut off, short of an act of God (see Tech doomsday scenario No. 5), attackers can create havoc by attacking it at one of its weakest points: the domain name system. By hijacking traffic meant for different domains, attackers can drive unsuspecting surfers to malicious sites, effectively take down any site by flooding it with traffic, or simply send everyone looking for Google.com or Yahoo.com into the ether -- making the Net largely useless for a great many people.
"Everybody trusts the DNS, but it's not really trustworthy," says Rod Rasmussen, president and CTO for anti-phishing services firm Internet Identity. "The system itself isn't well protected. And all you need are a name and a password to take out a DNS server or a particular domain."
Attackers don't even need to attack DNS servers or poison their
Assignment Software Engineering
1. As software becomes more pervasive, risks to the public (due to faulty programs) become an increasingly important concern. Develop a realistic doomsday scenario where a failure of a computer program could do great harm (endanger human life or economies).
Tech doomsday scenario: The Net goes down
News flash: The Internet melted down today as millions of Web surfers found themselves redirected to the wrong sites, thanks to problems with the domain name server system.
Can the Internet be taken offline? Many experts scoff at the idea, citing too many diverse communications channels, too many redundancies, and architecture designed to route around failures.
"I think it would be very difficult to take down the whole Internet, unless you had a worldwide EMP event that takes everything else down as well," says Dr. Ken Calvert, chair of the University of Kentucky's Department of Computer Science. "At all levels you have diversity of technology carrying the bits, whether it's satellite, fiber, or wireless. There's a lot of redundancy there."
Yet even if the Net can't be entirely shut off, short of an act of God (see Tech doomsday scenario No. 5), attackers can create havoc by attacking it at one of its weakest points: the domain name system. By hijacking traffic meant for different domains, attackers can drive unsuspecting surfers to malicious sites, effectively take down any site by flooding it with traffic, or simply send everyone looking for Google.com or Yahoo.com into the ether -- making the Net largely useless for a great many people.
"Everybody trusts the DNS, but it's not really trustworthy," says Rod Rasmussen, president and CTO for anti-phishing services firm Internet Identity. "The system itself isn't well protected. And all you need are a name and a password to take out a DNS server or a particular domain."
Attackers don't even need to attack DNS servers or poison their