The Phoenix Recovery System: Rebuilding from the Ashes of an Internet Catastrophe

The Internet today is highly vulnerable to Internet catastrophes: events in which an exceptionally successful Internet pathogen, like a worm or email virus, causes data loss on a significant percentage of the computers connected to the Internet. Incidents of successful wide-scale pathogens are becoming increasingly common on the Internet today, as exemplified by the Code Red and related worms [6] and LoveBug and other recent email viruses. Given the ease with which someone can augment such Internet pathogens to erase data on the hosts that they infect, it is only a matter of time before Internet catastrophes occur that result in large-scale data loss.