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.'"
Re:Strength is weakness (Score:3, Interesting)
No single point of failure? Correct. Instead it seems to be many points of failure. I am not a networking wiz and I don't even like networking issues, but I have taken a few networking classes and after trying to set up even basic RIP stuff I'm amazed that the internet works at all. It's been a while ago but I recall that even one team in our lab screwing up brought down the whole network.
Re:Route filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
What about ISPs whose customers bring their own portable IP address space along with them, and then multi-home? (i.e. have two or more ISPs, and request BGP peering with both?)
The directly-connected ISPs can do their checks to make sure that their customer owns that IP address and adjust their filters accordingly... but anybody else with BGP peering to these ISPs (i.e. other ISPs) can only hope and pray that their peers are doing the right thing. Blind faith might not be good enough.
As I understand it, SBGP [cisco.com] would implement PKI and digital signatures to ensure that only someone who actually *owns* a particular netblock/ASN can advertise a route for it.
Currently, anyone can advertise pretty much anything and it's only individual ISPs filtering settings that would prevent it getting propagated.
Beware: plans to fix this are misguided (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen alternate routing protocols proposed wherein your traffic has to barter/haggle its way through the network at every hop, as some new troll demands a passage fee for a certain QOS.
These new methods look to me like they would create two issues:
1. Unpredictable permutations of complex, balkanized, and non-local routing strategies. Performance of the system as a whole would be unpredictable and possibly unstable.
2. It really is back to the old circuit-switching network of ma bell, on top of IP. A few nice low-latency end-to-end Concorde-like connections for those willing to fork over the dough, clogging up the routers so all the proletariat traffic suffers in a poverty of routes and bandwidth.
Deep Simplicity at the core of routing protocol is the only thing that will work at the scale of the Internet. Maybe a "voluntary-QOS-downgrade" flag on email packets etc, and a "pretty please low latency" flag on video packets, might work, but these should not have monetary contracts associated with them. They should just indirectly affect the end-consumer's bandwidth bill if anything.
How it keeps working is actually straightforward. (Score:2, Interesting)