Securing BGP: A Case Study (7)
In the last post on this series on securing BGP, I considered a couple of extra questions around business problems that relate to BGP. This time, I want to consider the problem of convergence speed in light of any sort of BGP security system. The next post (to provide something of a road map) should…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (6)
In my last post on securing BGP, I said— Here I’m going to discuss the problem of a centralized versus distributed database to carry the information needed to secure BGP. There are actually, again, two elements to this problem—a set of pure technical issues, and a set of more business related problems. The technical problems…
CAP Theorem and Routing
In 2000, Eric Brewer was observing and discussing the various characteristics of database systems. Through this work, he observed that a database generally has three characteristics— Consistency, which means the database will produce the same result for any two readers who happen to read a value at the same moment in time. Availability, which means…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (5)
BGP provides reachability for the global ‘net, as well as being used in many private networks. As a system, BGP (ultimately) isn’t very secure. But how do we go about securing BGP? This series investigates the questions, constraints, and solutions any proposal to secure BGP must deal with as a case study of asking the…
Reaction: BGP convergence, divergence & the ‘net
Let’s have a little talk about BGP convergence. We tend to make a number of assumptions about the Internet, and sometimes these assumptions don’t always stand up to critical analysis. . . . On the Internet anyone can communicate with anyone else – right? -via APNIC Geoff Huston’s recent article on the reality of Internet…
DoS’ing your mind: Controlling information inflow
Everyone wants your attention. No, seriously, they do. We’ve gone from a world where there were lots of readers and not much content, to a world where there is lots of content, and not many readers. There’s the latest game over here, the latest way to “get 20,000 readers,” over there, the way to “retire…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (4)
In part 1 of this series, I looked at the general problem of securing BGP, and ended by asking three questions. In part 2 and part 3, I considered the third question: what can we actually prove in a packet switched network. For this section, I want to return to the first question: Should we…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (3)
To recap (or rather, as they used to say in old television shows, “last time on ‘net Work…”), this series is looking at BGP security as an exercise (or case study) in understanding how to approach engineering problems. We started this series by asking three questions, the third of which was: What is it we…
Cultivate questions
Imagine that you’re sitting in a room interviewing a potential candidate for a position on your team. It’s not too hard to imagine, right, because it happens all the time. You know the next question I’m going to ask: what questions will you ask this candidate? I know a lot of people who have “set…
Securing BGP: A Case Study (2)
In part 1 of this series, I pointed out that there are three interesting questions we can ask about BGP security. The third question I outlined there was this: What is it we can actually prove in a packet switched network? This is the first question I want dive in too—this is a deep dive,…