Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
The idea of independent, non-communicating "battle groups" for an SDI system sounds great. But what about the "fratricide" problem? Brint
To: RISKS FORUM (Peter G. Neumann, Coordinator) <RISKS@SRI-CSL.ARPA> cc: horning@decwrl.DEC.COM (Jim Horning) ------------------------------------- From: horning@decwrl.DEC.COM (Jim Horning) Date: 20 Dec 1985 1413-PST (Friday) To: RISKS@SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Can Bank of New York Bank on Star Wars? [PGN's retitling] Last night in the debate at Stanford on the technical feasibility of the SDI, Richard Lipton chose the financial network as an example of the advantages of a distributed system (such as he is proposing for SDI) over a centralized one. "There have been no catastrophes." [What about the ARPANET collapse? PGN] ------------------------------------- The ARPANET collapse is a good contrasting case to show what Lipton was talking about. His point about the financial "network" is that it isn't a monolithic system, but a set of many (dozens?, scores?, hundreds?) independant systems. Any one of the systems could fail (even catastrophically) and it wouldn't be much of a problem for the whole system. ARPANet is a single monolithic system, centrally designed and administered. Most bugs manifest at exactly the same provocations at widely separated parts of the net. There are at least a couple of separate national networks of automatic teller machines, and if any one of them dies, it shouldn't have any effect on the others, or on any of the banks with only local networks, or no networks at all. It would take a collapse of the phone system to put them all out of commission. ARPANet on the other hand is a monolithic system. There is one protocol that all parts of the system must share, a common medium is used, and in there are only a few implementations of the protocols. It doesn't take much to blow the whole system out of the water. (For the most part it's as reliable as it is is only because it gets constant use, and new parts aren't put in until they are shown to work most of the time.) What Lipton was proposing at the Stanford debate was that we make an anti-missile shield from many separately designed and implemented parts so that their failure modes are more independant. This is a good idea, and if it were done, I would have plenty of faith in the system. However, that's not the way government gets things done. Since the DOD is running the program there's no way there would be more than three "separate" designs, and they would all go through the same approval process, removing many of the differences they started with. Back to the ARPANet example, if you look at a larger system than just ARPA, including UUCP, DECNet, IBM's internal network, as well as the SOURCE, TYMNet, Compuserve, etc., you find the same robustness. ARPANet may die and be out of commission for a long time, and most people will still be able to get work done through some other medium, since only a fraction of the people using computer networks depend on any one of them. Chris
Chris, I agree with many of your comments, and feel that the $38 billion problem at Bank of New York is much more typical of how problems in nominally "independent" systems can propagate because of the intrinsic need to communicate. (As an example of a non-obvious interaction, recall its effects on the platinum futures market.) In addition to the problems you cite, Lipton's scheme suffers from a few other flaws, including: - The "simulation" that indicates that "only 5-10% extra bullets" would be needed apparently makes two dubious assumptions: 1) Independent "battle groups" (with sufficient "teraflops") can pinpoint targets as accurately as a cooperating distributed system. 2) Each "battle group" is able to recognize all "kills" by any battle group. I.e., the "extra bullets" counted are only those that are fired simultaneously at a target. With many of the proposed weapons, targets would be disabled, rather than disintegrated; with kinetic weapons, a single target could disperse to form a threat crowd. (Note that observation of kills is a form of communication intrinsic to the problem.) - There were good systems reasons (completely outside of the computing requirements) that led the Fletcher commision to propose cradle-to-grave tracking (especially for RV vs. decoy discrimination) and a layered defense. Lipton gave no evidence of understanding those reasons, let alone making credible alternate proposals. - The systems that you cite, and that he cited, are all ones where each component is in routine use under the exact circumstances that they must be reliable for. No matter how many independent subsystems the Lipton SDI is divided into, NONE of them will get this kind of routine use under conditions of saturation attack where reliability will be most critical. Thus there is a high probability that each of them would fail (perhaps in independent ways!). Jim H.
To: horning@DECWRL.DEC.COM cc: LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU, RISKS@SRI-CSL.ARPA From: horning at decwrl.DEC.COM (Jim Horning) More generally, I am interested in reactions to Lipton's proposal that SDI reliability would be improved by having hundreds or thousands of "independent" orbiting "battle groups," with no communication between separate groups (to prevent failures from propagating), and separately designed and implemented hardware and software for each group (to prevent common design flaws from affecting multiple groups). That is absurd on the face of it. To prevent propagation of failures, systems must be truly independent. To see the nonsense involved, assume layer #1 can kill 90% of the incoming threat, and layer #2 is sized to handle a maximum threat that is 10% of the originally launched threat. If layer 1 fails catastrophically, you're screwed in layer #2. Even if Layers 1 and 2 don't talk to each other, they're not truly independent.
The following appeared on USENET net.general today (Dec 27). Martin. -------- "A much more sinister arrival on the robot scene is named Prowler. Created by Robot Defense Systems in Colorado, Prowler has been designed for use as a sentry to guard military installations, warehouses and other sites where security is important. When made available in the near future, this squat, sturdy, mobile device will carry microcomputers, software and sensors capable of locating intruders. Chillingly, buyers will be able to arm Prowler with machine guns and grenade launchers; they'll also be able to program the robot to fire at will. The manufacturer claims that interest in Prowler has been high, both among domestic companies who see it as a comparatively low-cost replacement for 24-hour human security, and certain foreign countries where government officials might prefer guards that will never revolt." — US Air magazine -- JP Massar, Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA -- ihnp4!godot!massar, massar@think.com.arpa -- 617-876-1111 Posted Fri 27-Dec-1985 16:08 Maynard Time. Martin Minow MLO3-3/U8, DTN 223-9922
About six hours after sending that message about mailers [RISKS-1.32], I found myself with the pleasant task of doing bit level reconstruction of XX's MAILQ: directory with DDT, because the system had crashed while MMAILR was in the middle of a disk transfer. Talk about ironic postscripts.... Cheers, Rob
* IF the overall decision is correct if and only if all five sub-decisions are correct, and * IF the sub-decisions are statistically independent, and * IF the probability that each sub-decision is correct is 0.9, * THEN the probability that the overall decission is correct is 0.9^5 = .59049 (vide any textbook in probability) which is *suspiciously* close to "59%". But when Bill Walsh mentioned this problem to me in LA he was adamant that this was NOT the explanation he wanted. -s
Please report problems with the web pages to the maintainer