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Why Is It Taking So Long To Secure Internet Routing?
CowboyRobot writes: We live in an imperfect world where routing-security incidents can still slip past deployed security defenses, and no single routing-security solution can prevent every attacks. Research suggests, however, that the combination of RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) with prefix filtering could significantly improve routing security; both solutions are based on whitelisting techniques and can reduce the number of autonomous systems that are impacted by prefix hijacks, route leaks, and path-shortening attacks. "People have been aware of BGP’s security issues for almost two decades and have proposed a number of solutions, most of which apply simple and well-understood cryptography or whitelisting techniques. Yet, many of these solutions remain undeployed (or incompletely deployed) in the global Internet, and the vulnerabilities persist. Why is it taking so long to secure BGP?"
The internet is in production. No one wants to touch anything that's already in production unless they literally can't make it any worse.
Otherwise we would have IPv6 as well.
Most of these solutions require some sort of central authority to manage the security of all the routes. Sounds great until you realize that there is no one that all the users of the Internet can trust. I am not even sure that users can trust their own governments to manage this without exploiting users for the sake of surveillance let alone other countries trust one another. If you can't trust one another the best thing to do is remain insecure but watch each other like hawks for any foul play.
which means they are bought and used for many years if not a decade or longer
your $50 or whatever you pay your ISP a month is not enough to afford new equipment every year
Exactly. The point of the Internet is to interconnect. If you introduce a new, incompatible protocol (more secure though it may be) and refuse to accept updates via the old one, you risk depeering on a massive scale. Remember when the global routing table tipped the scales? And how people freaked out because they couldn't watch their favorite cat video - or conduct meaningful e-commerce? Yeah, expect that type of reaction x 1 million while every major ISP figures out how to rebuild the Internet from scratch.
Could someone please explain the parent comment to me in a way that does not involve marijuanna?
The network was originally developed and used by the dept of defense to connect military bases in case of nuclear war. It later spread to academic as well as corporate presences.
I don't think you understand capitalism or socialism. Capitalism is an economic system based on the generation, purchase, sale, and ownership of property amongst private parties. Socialism is a government model that imposes itself on individual rights and choices for the sake of what the leadership thinks is the common good. They're not a zero sum game. In fact, what we're seeing in the US now is how one can actually boost the other into whole new realms of abuse across the board. Thanks to this interaction, we have a government culture that doesn't give a shit about the rights of the citizens it's supposed to represent, and we have an economy that increasingly does not cater to the consumer. Each washes the other's back.
This is why net neutrality is damned if you do damned if you don't. Either you have the isps play favorites with connectivity, or you have the state mandating standards which will eventually move towards censorship of data that negatively affects the interests of the single issue lobbyists (corporate and social) making up its collective yet fragmented view of the world. Ideally, I'd want the internet of 1990 with today's bandwidth and reliability, but if I had to choose, I'd rather deal with an overmetered network than one whose culture is dictated by corporates wanting to corner markets with legislation, and politically correct, thin skinned, pompous asses, pushing 'social justice' in the form of soviet style censorship policies and methods.
When it comes down to it, the main reason is cost. Telcos (or any big business) HATE spending money, and if they feel they can get away without doing so they will.
Ours is not to reason why, just to do as we are told...
How much financial penalty is there for having insecure routes (or routers?) Hmm... None, basically. Ok. How much is this upgrade going to cost? Wow...that much? Well, there's your problem!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Strawman.
They don't have to. They have CALEA ports.
Except "Attacker" in this case is the administrator at the peer, and the peers are entire companies, multinationals, and governments. We're not talking about your average basement-dweller script kiddie.
If your peers are messing with you, or their peers are messing with them, how do you defend against an attack where the whole system is based on trust?
You could go to a no-trust solution, but then that would need a central authority that would need to pre-calculate all the routes from every single AS. If a route breaks, that'll be slow to adjust to a backup route. If a new route needs to be added, the ISP would need to apply to a central authority with bureaucracy and red tape.
If a route needed to be blackholed because of a DDOS, and that action had to be approved of by a central authority, which could take days to weeks for a ruling, nothing could be done because routers would not accept changes to any route until then.
Essentially, the answer to security is to effectively lock out the AS ISPs from their own routers.
You either trust the AS administrators or you don't. And since they're humans, they'll make mistakes, be malicious, or be affected by politics. This won't be solved by (trusting) a central bureaucracy similar to the UN, at least not in a manner you'll prefer.
Nine.
"Moogs! Would YOU buy that for a quarter?" CMK
Its not actually a problem, thats why. The submitter doesn't actually understand what he's suggesting and why the current method of dealing with this issue works fine.
You know who is doing the damage and 'attacking' you, they are easy to identify, and you just stop talking to them. They're only going to connect to a relatively small number of people so disconnecting bad players is trivial, then you never talk to them again. They bare the cost of having all the money invested in setting up the original connections they used to 'attack' with being lost. And lets be clear, BGP attacks aren't done via virtual connections, they're done across physical connections so you know EXACTLY who is doing them and which cable to unplug to solve the problem.
Do you upgrade every router running BGP, or just turn off the 2 connections to the bad guy? Its just not worth the effort to 'fix the problem' with a technical solution when good old fashion common sense tactics work just as well and for far less cost (read: effort for everyone involved) Even if it were a major backbone provider, the number of connections to cut is still trivial compared to even upgrading all the routers that the single largest backbone providers connect to.
This is a stupid question to ask and just illustrates not understanding the actual problem. The costs of 'fixing' the problem technical FAR outweighs the benefits of doing so (not having to manually disconnect troublesome players).
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If that was a serious question, and not trolling:
The in-addr.arpa DNS zone is used for reverse DNS.
Basically, you forward-map hostnames to IP addresses. At the same time, you can reverse-map IP-addresses to hostnames.
The forward mapping is done via 'A' records.
The reverse mapping is done via 'PTR' records, and it's done in the in-addr.arpa hiearchy.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
How can government and LEO's surveil us if everything is locked down?
Yes
> and then suddenly we completely ran out of IPv4 addresses, so everyone, even Microsoft, had no choice but to get moving on IPv6
Ftfy . Most computing devices sold in the last three years don't run Windows. Microsoft is now a minority player. Android is #1, iOS #2.
So which companies have influence? Android is the most popular operating system, so it's support of IPv6 is important. Most end points that need new addresses get those addresses assigned by one of the major mobile carriers, while older equipment is still using the same old IPs on Comcast and Time Warner. The equipment on the backbones is mostly Cisco gear, so it matters what Cisco supports the best, but they'll provide whatever Comcast and Level3 want to buy.
There are more than 600 million Web sites, according to NetCraft. Who is going to maintain a list like that? It's going to cost a lot of money...who is going to pay for it? Who is going to have the power to decide who gets in, and who doesn't? What about appeals, for those who feel they have been unjustly removed from the list? What about opposing points of view? Does the US get to decide which Chinese sites get to be on the list, or vice versa?
When you say "cruising on empty", how do you explain the huge number of top-tier tech companies that are US based? Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, Google, nVidia, AMD, Qualcom...
Dunno, I kind of think capitalism does quite fine at providing ideas. Let me know when everyone else catches up to Intel's current process tech, till then maybe we shouldnt write off capitalism as "cruising on empty".
The headline made me do a double-take. It's like asking "why is it taking so long to develop an invisibility cloak?" or "why is it taking so long to develop flying cars?".
The problem is, we're tipped over into corporatism where the net is controlled by a very few very large legal sictions tha tthe courts insist are somehow people.
You worry about the bad old government censoring the net but forget to worry about the ISPs censoring the net.
I can't imagine why you think the overmetered network protects us from the market cornering legislation and the pompous asses. Without proper net neutrality, we get all of the above and nowhere to turn.
Only in the USA. In other parts of the world the NSA collaborates with like-minded agencies from allies like the UK and Germany, and in parts of the world that are unfriendly they do rely heavily on backdoors.
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> In the corporate world no-one's manipulating huge spreadsheets or writing 500 page legal documents on an iPad.
I'm guessing that in your corporate world, nobody HAS huge spreadsheets because they're putting the huge stuff in the RDMS whre it belongs. iPads aren't the right tool for significant datasets, and neither is Excel. In my world, most people do not use the right tool for the job.
'Nuff said. Can't get shit done with his constant bullshit spouting.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I train massive numbers of people in BGP every year. The best would go for it. The average are just happy to peer and move on.
IT completely lacks process. ITIL is a joke. People insist on wasting time doing the same thing over and over. The best networking companies I know with the absolute best people are rarely more professional than a bunch of script kiddies. The best of the best hack away on networking and routing like and orangoutang playing with a toy piano. Modern IT is rarely better off than a bunch of idiots in comfort zones who make changes indiscriminately and send the invoice.
There is no profit in fixing BGP. It works and most IT engineers operating peers don't care. There is nothing which says "the internet won't work if we don't do this.". There's not even a clear line of how you would gain money by making such a change.
The internet will never implement a feature simply because it's useful or right. We do it because of the money, because it's fun or because our peering won't function without it.
They open offices overseas because theyre global companies, not because the US sucks. If the US sucked they wouldnt be headquartered here.