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

  • Flavio Junqueira ,
  • Ranjita Bhagwan ,
  • Keith Marzullo ,
  • Stefan Savage ,
  • Geoffrey M. Voelker

Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS) |

Published by USENIX

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.