The US Federal Communications Commission recently asked for comments on securing Internet routing. While I worked on the responses offered by various organizations, I also put in my own response as an individual, which I’ve included below.
My second post on privacy for network engineers is up over at Packet Pushers—
I’ve kicked off a series over at Packet Pushers on the ; the first installment is up now.
Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.
Off-topic post for today …
In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—
While reading a research paper on address spoofing from 2019, I ran into this on NAT (really PAT) failures—
Fear sells. Fear of missing out, fear of being an imposter, fear of crime, fear of injury, fear of sickness … we can all think of times when people we know (or worse, a people in the throes of madness of crowds) have made really bad decisions because they were afraid of something. Bruce Schneier has documented this a number of times. For instance: “it’s smart politics to exaggerate terrorist threats” and “fear makes people deferential, docile, and distrustful, and both politicians and marketers have learned to take advantage of this.”
Intentionally poisoning BGP routes in the Default-Free Zone (DFZ) would always be a bad thing, right? Actually, this is a fairly common method to steer traffic flows away from and through specific autonomous systems. How does this work, how common is it, and who does this? Jared Smith joins us on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the technique, and his research into how frequently it is used.
One of the big movements in the networking world is disaggregation—splitting the control plane and other applications that make the network “go” from the hardware and the network operating system. This is, in fact, one of the movements I’ve been arguing in favor of for many years—and I’m not about to change my perspective on the topic.
When I was in the military we were constantly drilled about the problem of Essential Elements of Friendly Information, or EEFIs. What are EEFis? If an adversary can cast a wide net of surveillance, they can often find multiple clues about what you are planning to do, or who is making which decisions. For instance, if several people married to military members all make plans to be without their spouses for a long period of time, the adversary can be certain a unit is about to be deployed. If the unit of each member can be determined, then the strength, positioning, and other facts about what action you are taking can be guessed.