Slashdot Mirror
Internet Routing, Looming Disaster?
wiredmikey writes "The Internet's leading architects have considered the rapid growth and fragmentation of core routing tables one of the most significant threats to the long-term stability and scalability of the Internet. In April 2010, about 15% of the world's Internet traffic was hijacked by a set of servers owned by China Telecom. In the technical world, this is typically called a prefix hijack, and it happened due to a couple of wrong tweaks made at China Telecom. Whether this was intentional or not is unknown, but such routing accidents are all too common online. While BGP is the de-facto protocol for inter-domain routing on the Internet, actual routing occurs without checking whether the originator of the route is authorized to do so. The global routing system itself is made up of autonomous systems (AS) which are simply loosely interconnected routing domains. Each autonomous system decides, unilaterally, and even arbitrarily, to trust everything it hears from any other AS, to use that information without validation, and to further transmit that information to its other peers..."
If by "problem solved" you mean the IRRs, you need some reality juice.
Most ASs do not use the IRRs, and the data in the IRRs is stale and often incorrect. This has been MEASURED by various RIRs, we see an update of that same presentation every two years, and nothing changes. It doesn't help that self-policing in the IRRs is utter crap (see: proxy objects).
Yes, people will push for RPKI. Deal with it. The anarchy screwed up, failed to uphold enough self-restraint and self-regulation to solve the problem in practice, and now we will have the same kind of crap needed for DNSSEC, now for routing.