hing that looks like a navigational map to route data much more efficiently. This navigation could be done with hyperbolic mapping.
According to a statement issued by the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Krioukov said, "It is very complicated, inefficient, and difficult to scale to the rapidly growing size of the Internet, which is now accessed by more than a billion people each day. In fact, we are already seeing parts of the Internet become intermittently unreachable, sinking into so-called black holes, which is a clear sign of instability."
The image below is a hyperbolic atlas of the Internet, as built and described in the Nature Communications paper. It shows the locations of Internet systems on the hyperbolic plane.
Image courtesy of Dmitri Krioukov, SDSC/CAIDA
Krioukov and his colleagues at CAIDA have been managing a project called Archipelago, or Ark, that constantly monitors the topology of the Internet, or the structure of its interconnections. They believe the severe stress to the Internet infrastructure and the existing Internet routing architecture may collapse in another decade or so. Krioukov said that improvements to critical infrastructure through hyperbolic mapping could be accomplished with incremental deployment; some routers use the hyperbolic atlas while others use the long lists. "There are many technical and non-technical issues to be resolved before the Internet map that we found would be the map that the Internet uses," he warns.
I asked Dmitri Krioukov how hyperbolic mapping would be applied in regards to security?
Krioukov said they haven't spent much time thinking about the security aspects of the proposed routing modifications yet, but he came up with one possibility. "With today's routing protocols, it's always a danger out there that those protocols can be attacked, e.g., an attacker can inject some malicious routing information into the system, hi-jacking or misdirecting traffic to wrong destinations. In our case, we don't have any routing protocols, as coordinates are fixed once and forever, therefore the (potential) threat above is removed." He also stressed that he is not a security expert.
So I'm asking you, the readers, do you think this scenario would be potentially more secure or more insecure? Would it make it easier to hack the fixed routes that would save us from sinking into a black hole?
Hyperbolic mapping and routing modifications may save the Internet from collapsing into a massive black hole. The improvement to our critical infrastructure may cause a new need for more security professionals. But a final warning . . . if you miss a work deadline or an online conference meeting, your boss may not believe you were temporarily sucked into a mysterious Internet black hole.