Engineers Ponder Easier Fix To Internet Problem

itwbennett writes "The problem: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enables routers to communicate about the best path to other networks, but routers don't verify the route 'announcements.' When routing problems erupt, 'it's very difficult to tell if this is fat fingering on a router or malicious,' said Joe Gersch, chief operating officer for Secure64, a company that makes Domain Name System (DNS) server software. In a well-known incident, Pakistan Telecom made an error with BGP after Pakistan's government ordered in 2008 that ISPs block YouTube, which ended up knocking Google's service offline. A solution exists, but it's complex, and deployment has been slow. Now experts have found an easier way."

Comments

Problem

[girlintraining]

So they've finally solved the problem of repressive governments disconnecting citizens from the internet, preventing the free flow of information, being co-opted by large corporations, and a litany of jurisdictional issues that have caused many people's lives to be ruined?

"No, they just made it so this can only be done by those people, and not your people. Our people are, of course, better than your people, being authoritative, responsible, and all of that."

Re:Well????

[dgatwood]

Or crawl through the barrage of bullets muttering something about uptime (obligatory xkcd).

Congressional Approval

[ComputerInsultant]

Do these engineers have approval from the US government to make these changes? Changes like this could break the ability to break the Internet. Can't have that.

Re:The big fix...

[jd]

BGP for IPv6 is essentially the same as BGP for IPv4, so if the protocol has a security hole then it will appear on both. However, because IPv6 is designed from the outset to be a hierarchical addressing scheme, address tables should end up being much smaller (even though each entry is longer) which in turn means that accidents should be less common. If it's easier to see the consequences of your actions, you (in theory) should be less likely to make mistakes.

Back in the days when IPv6 mandated IPSec, the problem of malicious router table poisoning simply wouldn't have existed -- all router protocol traffic would be encrypted and every link would be encrypted distinctly, where the keys used for encryption are securely exchanged in an encrypted form via IKE or IKE2 and where the key exchange encryption key is either a shared secret or a public/private key pair. It would not eliminate accidental corruption, but attacks would be out of the question.

Also back then, automatic address assignment, router and service discovery (via anycasting) and router-level IP mobility (the routers automatically redirected packets if you moved between networks) meant that manual router configuration was almost unnecessary. Virtually everything could be discovered - including MTU - and so nothing really needed to be configured. This would have eliminated manual errors. In fact, that was the whole point of all these automated mechanisms. There would be no manual entry and therefore there would be no manual errors.

Telebit added a nice touch, creating a routing protocol that permitted segments of the network to be transparent (essentially the same as NAT, only far more fine-grained and flexible), although it seems they made the grievous error of not making their protocol public. Certainly I've seen nobody attempt to use it and there has been no reference to it since Telebit went under. Further, the lack of NAT is something that has held back IPv6. Given that Telebit had a working NAT equivalent in 1996, this is incredibly annoying. (Apologies if they did make it public, but it is still true that it's not used and that complaints about a lack of NAT have been a serious issue - made all the more serious precisely because the problem was solved and the solution deployed very very early on.)

So the answer is "if IPv6 is deployed as close to originally intended as possible, the problem simply doesn't exist - in any form; but that if IPv6 is deployed as it is currently used, the hole will hang around although it will be a little smaller".

Solution is called Rover, Uses Reverse DNS

[billstewart]

TFA wasn't very detailed either, but it mentions that the new protocol is called Rover. Project website is here. The short summary is that you can use Reverse DNS to advertise the BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) that's authoritative for your block of address space, and use DNSSEC to protect the Reverse DNS tree. If somebody else starts advertising that they've got a route to your address block, routers (or route servers sitting next to the routers, because your standard router doesn't actually know how to do this) can verify whether that's correct.