Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Duke Research Experiment Disrupts Internet Traffic

Posted by timothy on from the oopsie-daisy dept.

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World about an experiment gone wrong which affected a big chunk of internet traffic yesterday morning: "It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the Internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE's data was soon passed from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems. ... [f]or a brief period Friday morning, about 1 percent of all the Internet's traffic was affected by the snafu, as routers could not properly process the BGP routes they were being sent."

2 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. It was a Cisco bug in a specific model of router by rwyoder · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/products_security_advisory09186a0080b4411f.shtml

  2. Re:Hmm... by comm3c · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Fake it? Not in the last five years!

    unless you know of some BGP peers that refuse the standard peering protocol, 1) they are required to only listen to routes from known surrounding peers, 2) will not be listening to what's being advertised by your router unless you have instructed them ahead of time what AS you manage and what prefixes you will be advertising to them.

    No. Period, fucking no. Most BGP sessions run between customers and carriers are still basically allowing whatever. Even the big boys basically don't care what you advertise. It would cause too many problems to go and begin filtering, so only regions that seem to have routing DBs (RIPE region) are even remotely participating in this. For the most part, thats a few places here and there, but the carriers will let you do what you want.

    Don't believe the hype: BGP is still as weak in public IP as it ever has been. The difference is that if you do decide to hijack someone else's prefixes (don't even include bogons, because the carriers will probably let you advertise those!), everyone will know and you will get your upstream looking at you.