On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 02:53:50 +0000, ess (phil
hunt) wrote:


I've argued elsewhere[1] that middle-income countries should
consider using a wireless internet mesh as the foundation for their
(civilian) information infrastructure. Why not allow the military
system to piggyback off that? (as a backup: the civilian
system might be down in an area, and there should be a separate
military system as well). Now a proper wireless internet
infrastructure would mean every apartment building, workplace,
school, hospital, etc being connected. It would be quite difficult,
both militarily and politically, to shut down such a widespread
network.

[1] at http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_122.html

The thought of relying on the internet as-is, or some future wireless
version therof, for military purposes scares me. Badly.

Distributed denial of service attacks would probably be one of the
more benign attacks against this sort of architecture. If there
exists a few unchecked buffers in some popular software (and it would
probably be hard to catch them _all_) much worse things could happen.
Not to mention some of the interesting possibilities for havoc that
arise from well-financed versions of classic schemes, such as the
current "Install the latest security patch from M$" problem.