Arson attack that left parts of German capital in darkness for days stirs outrage over infrastructure insecurity
  • Atelopus-zeteki@fedia.io
    11·
    7 days ago

    Electricity distribution and generation are not set up as redundant networks. This practically guarantees there will be outages. There was a car accident in my town last year, and it took out power to about 1/3 of the town, because they hit a power pole. Which got me thinking, how many ‘single point’ failures away from total collapse? And how would an adversary use that information?

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      7 days ago

      Eliminating single-point failures is useful if you don’t expected correlated failure – multiply the chance of having Point A fail by the chance of Point B failing to get the chance of A and B failing simultaneously, for uncorrelated failure. But…a malicious attacker is a pretty good example of where you’d expect correlated failure, since an attacker who wants to create a failure can hit both points.

      Eliminating single point failures would be nice in dealing with grid unreliability resulting from, say, accidental damage. But it’s gonna be less useful if someone is trying to plan around bringing down the grid.