[ih] NBS seminar on TCP/IP (was TCP RTT Estimator)

[Jack Haverty]

You reminded me of another item on the to-do list for routing mechanisms 
-- how do we "excise" a particular router (e.g., that had been captured) 
from the network?"

Curiously, I've much later realized this is not so different from how 
you excise a network node that has been successfully attacked by 
malware.   Seems possibly harder, especially to detect, because there's 
probably no "boom" involved to indicate something bad has happened.

We knew about the possibility of such events.   I remember Metcalfe once 
telling the story of a 1980s bug in a maintenance tool at Xerox PARC 
which was wreaking havoc throughout their network, and had "holed up" in 
the CEOs workstation which was inaccessible to the techie minions.

Jack

On 4/25/25 16:03, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
>
>
> On 4/25/25 3:17 PM, Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
>
>> So far, based on what I’ve read, I don’t see any evidence that the 
>> concerns of the military, or users of lossy networks, were given 
>> insufficient consideration.
>
> For a while (circa 1972/73), while at SDC, I worked on projects for 
> the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
>
> We were working on packet switched networking issues, mostly for 
> tactical communications.  And we were highly concerned with lossy 
> networks - not only in terms of packet loss (or corruption) but also 
> with the loss of physical assets, such as routers/gateways 
> disappearing (usually accompanied by a loud "boom" from conventional 
> explosives or intense X-rays from a nuclear blast - the "cold war" was 
> running rather hot at the time.)
>
> (We were also concerned with the physical capture of operating packet 
> switching devices or the links between them.  I remember one project 
> where we were concerned about loss of devices due to them being 
> dropped into the mud by tired Marines slogging across a battlefield.)
>
> This was well before the advent of TCP but the idea of highly dynamic 
> routing of store-and-forward packets was well accepted as the right 
> road forward.
>
> Much of what I saw during those years was hidden behind 
> cone-of-silence upon cone-of-silence - Our world was "we don't talk 
> about it" or "everything is classified".  (I even got dinged for 
> publishing a piece based only on open source/unclassified materials.)
>
> So it would not be surprising that the academic and tech communities 
> that were not inside our security walls did not hear us loudly 
> expressing our concerns.
>
>     --karl--

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