2025-10-24 –, Europe
Before the Internet existed, Sharla Perrine proved—using punched cards—that it could survive a nuclear strike. Sixty years later, we trust the cloud with everything. This talk revisits her forgotten Monte Carlo experiments and proposes a modern rerun: same logic, new topology, fresh risks. If Perrine’s math built the Internet, it’s time to ask ourselves whether that math still holds—or whether resilience has quietly rotted.
In the early 1960s, RAND researchers Paul Baran and Sharla Perrine (later Boehm) quietly ran a set of Monte Carlo experiments that changed history. Using punched cards and octal assembly, Sharla’s simulations proved that a distributed packet-switched network could survive attack or failure—work that Vint Cerf later used to persuade DARPA to fund what became the ARPANET.
Yet her name faded into the footnotes. After her death in 2023, she was described as the “grandmother of the Internet” only in the fine print of a real-estate listing—not yet on her Wikipedia page.
This lightning talk reintroduces Sharla Perrine and Paul Baran not just as pioneers, but as data-driven systems thinkers. It also proposes a new research effort: re-running their Monte Carlo simulations under modern assumptions and using contemporary toolchains—to revisit network survivability, traffic models, and failure modes, including time-synchronization shear effects in packet-switched networks.
By comparing 1960s-era modeling assumptions with the centralized “cloud” architectures of today, we may uncover how far the Internet has drifted from its resilient origins—and perhaps even find bugs in the original Monte Carlo code.
Audience Takeaway: The Internet’s founding math was sound, but our faith in its resilience may rest on outmoded—or even false—assumptions.
Trey Darley has been a long-standing member of the FIRST community, and has served a variety of volunteer roles, including a term on the FIRST board, during which he co-founded the FIRST standards committee. Trey is well known for his work on open cybersecurity standards like STIX/TAXII and others. He's also been aligned with the Langsec faction for many years. Trey's patron saints are Grace Hopper, Evi Nemeth, and Paul Erdös.