The problem of monoculture
@acrollI wrote a piece a while back about how centralized computing makes a cloud a big target. I didn’t want to get into the biological origins of this stuff, but one commenter was right: Monoculture is a precursor to extinction.
In university (which seems a long, long time ago) I wrote my thesis on evolutionary theory and product life cycles. Admittedly, not a screamingly fun topic, but it did give me a chance to read up on the Burgess Shale and other such things.
Now comes word that Amazon’s EC2, by virtue of the independence it affords hosters, is being used by bad guys for nefarious misdeeds (thanks to Rachel Chalmers of The 451 for pointing it out.) This provides an additional risk: Many of the Internet’s defense mechanisms involve black-holing specific hosters when the sites they’re operating do bad things.
Of course, when you’re hosting many applications, having one of them get blacklisted can be a nuisance for all the others. What’s interesting is the back-pressure we’re seeing arise against the popularity of cloud computing: At Structure, we debated the fear of lock-in; Stacey has a great piece on enterprise obstacles to adoption; and here, we’re seeing the downside of on-demand, easy-access platforms.
In other words, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that doesn’t just apply to dinosaurs.
One Comment, Comment or Ping
Steve Shah
This is actually a much older problem, one felt by large web sites and large ISPs. For example, the classic issue is where an attacker launching a an attack with IP addresses spoofed from AOL’s proxy servers could make a poorly managed web site shut off what may have been one of its largest user bases. The inverse problem was seen in spam control — casual glance of IP blocks for spam senders could make dumb spam catchers block off all of Hotmail.
The unfortunate answer to the question of dealing with bad guys is that you don’t block at the network level. Your best bet is blocking at the application level, if you block at all. For spam control, it was the only method that is reliable. For attacks against web sites, filters on the HTTP protocol were the only way to cope with botnets flooding a site with bogus requests. The exception is human managed tables of networks that are considered “bad” — spam control has used this with good results, but nice guys still get caught in friendly fire.
Jul 3rd, 2008
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