Attack 9
Physical Destruction of the Database
Attack 2 - copy legitimate IDs from existing products
Attack 3 - Steal bulk IDs from the database
Attack 4 - Subverting the Channel
Attack 5- Subverting the Database
Attack 6 - Subverting the Server
Attack 8 - Distributed Denial of Service
Attack 9 - Physical Destruction of the Database
Once the potential attacker recognises that the integrity of the database
cannot be broken, it may well occur to them that their only option is
to physically destroy the database.
Our protection against that will be based on the same provisions we need to make for multiple redundancy in order to avoid any possibility of "downtime". The database will be cloned across several sites in several countries. Its WORM sources will be similarly cloned, probably to a different selection of sites. Each site will be selected to meet at least reasonable security standards although we needn't demand Fort Knox levels of physical security, trusting instead to numbers to provide protection. Granted, a sophisticated and co-ordinated military attack could be simultaneously launched against all 15 (or whatever) sites but this implies the actions of a seriously hostile government rather than mere counterfeiters, or even the more serious elements of organised crime. If we ever face that sort of attack, we think we'll have more to worry about than the integrity of Codel data.
Ultimately, the best protection against physical attack will be to transfer the entire system from centralised servers to a distributed peer to peer network. Currently, however, that would make it much more difficult to guarantee other aspects of our security and integrity. Nevertheless, should a viable peer to peer solution be presented, we would almost certainly adopt it.
The only other physical threat which could take out all the data simultaneously would be a major asteroid strike and, again, we think we'd have other things on our minds in those circumstances!
With these measures in place, and any others that are brought to our attention from time to time, we are confident that we'll be able to justify our ambitious target: to become the safest and most trusted online database in the world.
