The Status of Routing Reform — How Fragile is the Internet? 139
crimeandpunishment points out the Associated Press's look (as carried by SkunkPost) "at an issue the government has been aware of for more than 20 years, but still isn't fixed and continues to cause Internet outages: a flaw in the routing system that sends data from carrier to carrier. Most outages are innocent and fixed quickly, but there's growing concern the next one could be devastating. A general manager at Renesys Corporation, which tracks the performance of Internet data routes, says, 'It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working.'"
It is fragile (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of. However, it has also always been this way, and it has survived so far. All that has really changed is the number of players has increased, and the size of the routing tables are increasing.
It has to work, so a lot of people should notice very quickly if something large goes wrong.
It also cannot very easily be fixed, as many players would have to spend a lot of money for it to change, and there is little financial incentive to chase that ghost.
And you thought IPv6 or DNSSEC adoption was taking a long time... imagine how many decades it would take for SBGP adoption?
Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, the US federal government shouldn't have the power to do this even in America, and it definitely doesn't have the power to enforce this in the rest of the world.
Secondly, no sane ISP will forward BGP data.
This limits the problem to people with access to core internet routers. Companies that own these routers should only give access to extremely trustworthy people, and even then, they should still only need to access the server when there's a legitimate change. The issue then lies with accidents, which will always happen, no matter what you do, and corruptness. Corrupt ISPs should be removed from the network as soon as they are found to be corrupt.
Use phone to manually change routes? (Score:5, Insightful)
"In the meantime, network administrators deal with hijacking an old-fashioned way: calling their counterparts close to where the hijacking is happening to get them to manually change data routes. Because e-mails may not arrive if a route has been hijacked, the phone is a more reliable option, says Tom Daly, chief technical officer of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides Web hosting and other Internet services."
Next article... "How Fragile is Wikipedia?" (Score:4, Insightful)
What?! Anyone can edit it?! Really???
'It amazes me every day when I get into work and find the Wikipedia front page has not been blanked or filled with goatse porn.'
We know what kind of "solution" DHS has in mind (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it," says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland Security.
So clearly we need one centrally owned routing system under the watchful and benevolent eye of DHS, right? With help from advisors provided by Microsoft and Disney.
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
it is fragile, but it works (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We know what kind of "solution" DHS has in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Decentralized routing is a feature, not a bug. And although the problems identified in the article are real enough, the implications of this kind of discussion always scare the hell out of me.
While agreeing with you, I would go a step further and suggest that the bugs of decentralized systems are often more palatable than the the features of centralized systems. (this is of course considering the context of this article -- the internet)
Feature not a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
This is ridiculous, I suspect this is FUD created to take control of the Internet. Routing tables are a feature of the Internet that are designed to ensure the Internet doesn't have a single point of failure. Hacked router?, connection hit by bomb?, satellite suffering from solar flares?... change a few routes and it's fixed. Security?... TLS. The moron even suggests that creating a central authority would make the Internet more secure!!! Imagine if you wanted to take out the Internet and it relied on a central authority, hmm, what would you attack, billions of Internet clients, millions of routers, or the one authority?
This is going to get worse (Score:2, Insightful)
With the FCC stymied in its attempts to regulate the internet, it's going to be basically an ISP fur ball. Layer general greed and self-interest of individual providers on top of load and routing problems, take away the regulators ability to maintain order and you have a recipe for disaster.
I got a bad feeling about this.
Re:Strength is weakness (Score:5, Insightful)
"I am not a networking wiz and I don't even like networking issues" So you tried to setup basic RIP and you are amazed the internet works at all huh.
Well this artical is pure BS, sure you packets go between multiple backbone ISP's and a couple smaller isps on the edge maybe, but the guys that run the bigger ISP's do have rules that govern how they BGP peer with other backbones and peers. They enforce strict BGP filtering, to keep the smaller compaines from causing major issues.
Sure every once in a awhile someone might fat finger some shit and mess something up that will effect 1 of the main backbones, but with more automated tools this happens way less than it used to. Most big backbone ISP's use router hierarchy and pure core routers are protected from anyone configuring them much at all once setup.
I think the system runs well, I am sure it could be made better in many ways, but the issues made here are non issues, the backbones one security would be the main factor here, and that should get only better over time.
Its better there is no central routing authority on the internet. Each company has it in thier best interest that it has the best routes to get to a centain network, and if that company messes its routes up, others should be protected by proper BGP filering. BGP filtering can get pretty complex, on ciscos this can be with prefix based ACL's and also with BGP AS number based ACL's, you can also use BGP communities to keep things nice and neat. If done correctly it can be pretty rock solid, if a rookie does the filtering you can have holes and issues, but a big company like LEVEL3 for instance, should have standards and all this stuff pretty hardened and worked out.
This internet sky is not falling.
Re:Not a problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Use phone to manually change routes? (Score:3, Insightful)
No solutions look heavy when you have been using Eclipse.
Re:The Internet is not going to end (Score:3, Insightful)
Euh... their are more then 13 routes, their are 13 addresses (prefixes) but their are many, many more routes, most of those 13 prefixes are announced in many places it's called anycast and their aren't just 13 servers either. Every one of them is a cluster of machines and as many use anycast their are multiple clusters per 'root nameserver'.