[Discuss] Cisco's IOx architecture

[feenberg at nber.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

On Sat, 1 Feb 2014, Peter (peabo) Olson wrote:

> On February 1, 2014 at 2:42 AM Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Is running applications on your router really such a good idea?
>>
>> http://gigaom.com/2014/01/31/in-a-distributed-world-cache-is-king-why-routers-are-becoming-the-new-server/
>> [...]
>>   Cisco's IOx architecture will be a Linux-based operating system that
>>   will be embedded in forthcoming industrial routers.
>>
>>   And unlike its previous box software, Cisco says it plans to open the
>>   IOx architecture up for others to run their own applications on
>
> A router should be a router.  Allowing applications to run on it invites serious
> security risks.

Perhaps they are thinking of load balancing/security/monitoring as the 
type of application that a user might run on the router itself. I don't 
imagine they expect users to run SQL or Word.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER