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Internet traffic for Google, Facebook, Apple was briefly rerouted to Russia
- bandrami 9y agoI've often said it's just as well that the public doesn't understand how BGP actually works.
- maltalex 9y agoIt's not just the public, it's professionals too. There are probably more brain surgeons on earth than people who understand how BGP works.
- lexxed 9y agoIsn't that what https is for ? So no one can read the traffic ?
- rblatz 9y agoAssuming that state level actors don’t have ways to get around https? I’d expect a nation like Russia could acquire or procure new key for the targeted domains or perform some unknown 0 day attack on the targeted companies to acquire the original key.
- nothrabannosir 9y agoNot with certificate pinning , which google certainly has, and I’d be surprised if the other two didn’t. It is an issue for smaller sites (which might have been the real target)
- icebraining 9y agoI don't think IE supports pinning, though, so if they could reliably detect the browser at the TLS handshake stage (don't know if it's possible) they could in theory serve their own cert to those users.
- cesarb 9y ago> so if they could reliably detect the browser at the TLS handshake stage (don't know if it's possible) It's possible and easy, the list of ciphers in the ClientHello is different. Take a look at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/clients.html https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/clients.html to see what several popular browsers look like.
- rblatz 9y agoThey still could perform a previously unknown attack to grab the original key. There could be a side channel attack that we are unaware of that could give out enough information to reconstruct the key. Heck I just saw a post today about an Oracle attack on TLS called ROBOT that a lot of big players are vulnerable to.
- zaarn 9y agoEven with encrypted traffic, an attacker can learn things, especially if you get DNS and SNI data I suspect (but cannot prove) that this might have been a leak from Russia's internal internet into the wider global net. Since Russia isn't well known for it's privacy respecting nature, it might have been a traffic scanner to see if people are being good citizens. However, that is just speculation and I hope it's wrong.
- cwilkes 9y agoYep, all you need to know is the IP addresses of certain domains (say Facebook) and then look for user IP transferring a lot of data to it meaning they are probably uploading a photo. Now tie that IP to an ISP and maybe a user and you can find out who might be posting derogatory memes about Putin.
- codedokode 9y agoBut you don't have to change routing for that - you can do that with just passive monitoring. And by the way, the law [1] that requires ISPs to store up to 6 months worth of traffic is coming into effect next year. So even monitoring won't be necessary. Maybe they were testing effective ways to block foreign sites? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarovaya_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarovaya_law
- otabdeveloper1 9y ago> Since Russia isn't well known for it's privacy respecting nature, it might have been a traffic scanner to see if people are being good citizens. Yes, indeed! Guilty until proven guilty! Keep up the upstanding attitude, good citizen!
- kkarp 9y agoChina did the same but for bigger scale in the past. The reason to do this is to store all traffic for future analysis. Now it is protected by https but there is no protocol or cryptography which couldn't be exploited in the future. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/how-china-swallowed-15-of-net-traffic-for-18-minutes/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/how-c...
- jcoffland 9y agoIsn't forward secrecy helpful in protecting against exactly this kind of thing?
- icebraining 9y agoThat only protects against breaches of the long-term key, not against attacks on the cipher itself, AFAIK. So if in the future they manage to attack AES (or whatever cipher the connection was using), forward secrecy won't help.
- wolf550e 9y agoIf you use 1024 bit DH with a common group (old/misconfigured web and email servers do this) then it is suspected nation states can break the DH, get the shared symmetric key and decrypt all traffic. For ECDHE over P-256, they would need to wait for a big quantum computer (which will break all recorded traffic that used a non-quantum resistant key exchange, which is all current traffic).
- pixl97 9y agoAre you sure your apps fail to connect if they don't negotiate forward secrecy?
- xfs 9y agoGoogle themselves have done the same thing https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/27/google_routing_blunder_sent_japans_internet_dark/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/27/google_routing_blun.... But as we all know, NSA does store all traffic for future analysis. A BGP leak from China or Russia, be that as it may, almost surely has nothing to do with storing traffic.
- Bainos 9y agoPerforming a DNS hijack has more uses than just reading the traffic. It gives you information on the amount of data that is sent towards a given prefix (among other uses, this can help for creating DDoS attacks later). It also makes those prefixes unavailable for as long as the attack persists, which is already a form of denial of service.
- riffic 9y agoThe open trusting nature of BGP is kind of problematic isn’t it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking
- iDemonix 9y agoI work for a medium sized ISP, we have about 500 peers over exchanges like LONAP and Linx. You'd be surprised how many of our peers won't use MD5 passwords or even filter properly.
- riffic 9y agoName and shame?
- a012 9y agoProbably he's still working at there, so he'd be forbidden to disclose customers name.
- dredmorbius 9y agoBGP peerings are publically published, that's how they work. Knowing which customers fail to secure their comms is another matter.
- a012 9y ago> Knowing which customers fail to secure their comms is another matter. Exactly what I meant.
- maltalex 9y agoBad idea. These are customers he's talking about. If you want to stay in business, naming and shaming your customers isn't a good strategy.
- iDemonix 9y ago
- emmelaich 9y agoIf this is not a reason to punish (blackhole?) that AS I don't know what is.
- maltalex 9y agoSure, it's a reason to blackhole the isp, but this is the Internet we're talking about. So say its upstream providers will backhole it, say even the tier 1 providers do the same. That won't stop it from connecting to smaller networks and announcing the same fake routes there. And even if the small networks blackhole it, the attackers can just register a new AS. Also, there are cases in which attackers are performed from large networks, with millions of users. Are you going to blackhole such a network? They'll apologize and claim that it was a configuration error. Note that these types of attacks are generally not performed by amateurs. They're performed by states, intelligence agencies, criminal organizations and the like.
- yeukhon 9y agoIs it fair to say BGP in general relies on “good will” trust model? I wonder if there exists an authoritative mechanism similar to browser punishing rouge or incompetent CA. I supposed the integrity and the authentication is achieved by implementing and deploying RPKI, but what about punishment?
- maltalex 9y ago> Is it fair to say BGP in general relies on “good will” trust model? Yes. > I wonder if there exists an authoritative mechanism similar to browser punishing rouge or incompetent CA Not really. Although if you get a reputation for being notoriously problematic, the "big boys" - the large networks who are the responsible adults in this game might deny you service or stop accepting your announcements. > I supposed the integrity and the authentication is achieved by implementing and deploying RPKI RPKI doesn't really solve the issue. It validates only the initial announcer, so BGP hijacks can still occur. It would however help reduce hijacks due to mistakes in configuration.
- bandrami 9y agoIt's better than it used to be. Back in the mid-90s I was a newly-minted network engineer working in my first datacenter and we were all very excited about this new "BGP" technology... Fifteen minutes later, half of Fairfax County is stuck in a routing loop, and we're getting calls from NOCs as far away as London asking us what the f* we're doing to their traffic. That was the wild west: back then, a typo could (and sometimes did) actually take down The Internet. There's more filtering and checking and second-guessing today. But, ultimately, it's based on a web of trust model, you're right, with all the weaknesses that come with that.
- partycoder 9y agoIn 1998, a hacker collective known as the L0pht testified in Congress that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. It is believed BGP black holes could be one way of achieving this. Basically tell every node "I've got the lowest routing cost to every node, send me all your traffic", and then drop all the traffic.
- aaomidi 9y agoThis is much better nowadays but bgp is still problematic.
- maltalex 9y agoIt's not really better today. Possibly even worse. In 1998 there were fewer than 5000 different networks (Autonomous systems) on the Internet. Today that number is over 80K. Network operators used to personally know each other and their clients. So the automatic filtering is better today than it was in 1998, but it can still be easily bypassed. I know for a fact that even as a tiny network, all you need to do to get the some of the biggest networks in the world to accept your (real or fake) BGP announcement is to email their support center.
- vvjhggjvg 9y ago> all you need to do to get the some of the biggest networks in the world to accept your (real or fake) BGP announcement is to email their support center They’ll do the needful alright.
- dredmorbius 9y agoAren't ASNs capped at 2^15 (65k and change)? Or has the IPv6 expansion already started happening?
- dsp1234 9y agoASN's switched over to 32 bits around 2007
- manugarri 9y agohopefully Comcast and AT&T will fix this soon
- notsgnik 9y agohopefully ethernum or ipfs will fix that :p
- jlgaddis 9y agoI wouldn't hold my breath, since neither of those have anything to do with the issue.
- alex_g 9y agoWhat is a prefix (in context), and what does it mean to ‘announce’ one?
- iDemonix 9y agoIn BGP you have sets of IP destinations, which you summarise as a prefix. Announcing or advertising means exactly what it sounds like, you announce to your peers that you have paths to these networks.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jlgaddis 9y agoA prefix is an IP subnet, basically. Most here are familiar with Google's public DNS resolver, 8.8.8.8, so let's use that as an example. Google has been assigned the autonomous system number (ASN) 15169. The 8.0.0.0/8 IP address space was allocated to Level3 and they have reallocated a small part of it, 8.8.8.0/24, to Google. Google, when speaking to their BGP peers, "announces" routes, including an announcement for the 8.8.8.0/24 prefix. An announcement is basically Google's router telling, for example, Level3's router, "Hey, I know how to get to 8.8.8.0/24. If you have traffic going there, you can send it to me." Level3 then passes that along to other peers, like me. Level3 says, "If you have traffic for 8.8.8.0/24, you can send it to me and I'll send it on towards its origin". The announcements continue to be passed along to other peers. A withdrawal is the opposite of an announcement: "Hey, I don't have a route to 8.8.8.0/24 anymore" or, in many cases, "the route to 8.8.8.0/24 has changed, here's the new one". Here's a (slimmed down) example from one of my routers: # sh ip bgp 8.8.8.0/24 | b 3356 3356 15169, (received & used) 4.69.248.15 from 4.69.248.15 (4.69.180.167) Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, external, best Community: 3356:3 3356:86 3356:575 3356:666 3356:2042 This shows the "AS path" (the path through the various ASNs back to the origin), "3356 15169". AS3356 is Level3. We can see that AS15169 (Google) originated the prefix (8.8.8.0/24), and announced it to their BGP peer, Level3. Level3 then passed that announcement along to my router. Here's the same thing for 66.232.224.0/24, mentioned in the article: # sh ip bgp 66.232.224.0/24 BGP routing table entry for 66.232.224.0/24, version 1125190207 Paths: (1 available, best #1, table Default-IP-Routing-Table) Advertised to update-groups: 4 3356 209 40839, (received & used) 4.69.248.15 from 4.69.248.15 (4.69.180.167) Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 100, valid, external, best Community: 209:209 209:13070 3356:3 3356:22 3356:86 3356:575 3356:666 3356:2042 The AS path here is "3356 209 40839" which shows that traffic from me to 66.232.224.0/24 will first go to Level3 (AS3356), then to Qwest/CenturyLink (AS209), and finally to AS40839 (Kohl's Department Stores). With regard to the hijack described in the article, this means that another organization announced the prefixes into BGP, effectively saying, "So, all of that traffic you have that's going to Apple/Facebook/Google/etc., just go ahead and start sending that to AS39523 now". Instead of ending up at Apple/Facebook/Google, it'll instead be redirected to this unknown organization in Russia. (N.B.: Before anyone chimes in to "correct" something, this is a bit simplified. There's much more to BGP than this and there are a number of different factors which determine which route is chosen. A longer prefix -- mentioned in the article -- is one way to "defeat" a better route.)
- codedokode 9y agoThis is not the first time when BGP is misused this way. I think governments should regularly perform live tests to check whether their countries' AS's can be hijacked.
- holyavengerone 9y agoBasic security. Like how everyone failed at keeping Equifax in check.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- topranks 9y agoAll AS's can be hijacked. Your suggestion is meaningless.
- maltalex 9y ago> I think governments should regularly perform live tests to check whether their countries' AS's can be hijacked. That's a waste of money and effort. They should just write "yes" on a piece of paper, there's really no reason to check.
- baybal2 9y agoThat AS was registered to dv-hyperlink.ru which is not in whois database Looks suspicious. How did they register an AS to a non-existing company to begin with?
- topranks 9y agoIt was assigned by RIPE to "Vasilyev Ivan Ivanovich, 8 Pionerskaya st., office 10, Nekrasovka, Khabarovsk region Russia". ALFA TELECOM s.r.o., in the Czech Republic seem to have acted as sponsoring LIR for the allocation. RIPE rules require that the sponsoring LIR submit documents to them showing the legal standing of the organisation that will use the resources. So in theory that should have happened here.
- vectorEQ 9y ago'normally' it gets routed to US (even if they have servers elsewhere to handle same shit...), which for most countries is actually more worrying...
- futurix 9y agoIf you believe that Russia is less worrying than US, then... err... I don't believe you exist actually.
- pixl97 9y agoWell, if you are a security researcher, Russia is less apt to redirect your flight mid ocean and arrest you in a country you weren't even going to. So I guess the US just might be more worrying to particular people based upon their occupation.
- codefined 9y agoThis seems oddly specific, am I missing something?
- macintux 9y agoI seem to recall such a scenario playing out when the U.S. was trying to catch Snowden. Or was it Assange? I regret to admit it's all a bit of a nightmarish blur at this point.
- walls 9y agoRight, Russia would just shoot it down.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoOr season the in-flight meal with polonium
- kbhn 9y ago
- baxtr 9y agoCould someone explain in laymen terms what happened and what that means?
- topranks 9y agoThe internet works by organisations "announcing" the IP ranges they're allocated to other networks (ISPs, other large companies etc.) Networks that receive an announcement will route traffic for those IP ranges to the network that announced them. The protocol by which this is done is called BGP. The original version of this was created in 1989 and back then everyone involved trusted each other. So there is no security built in to prevent a rogue company announcing addresses they don't own, and therefore pulling in traffic people send to those addresses. Organisations can and do put filters in place to try and stop this, but because it's not a core baked in feature of BGP not everyone does, and issues can happen. Sometimes these things are just mistakes engineers make, re-announcing routes they've learnt elsewhere. Sometimes they are deliberate hi-jacks.
- ag_47 9y agoBasically, a router somewhere in Russia claimed to be the owner of some ip addresses belonging to Google, Facebook, etc. Other neighbouring routers began forwarding packets from actual users to this router. The packets contain the HTTPS requests people were making to these sites.
- VVayneTracker 9y agoBit late to the party but what could be done with the information that they got their hands on?
- GCU-Empiricist 9y agoInternet traffic goes through whatever path will get it to it's destination fastest. Big Routers advertise to each other how long it will take to get somewhere through them. There have been times when either due to bugs, or due to a desire to slurp traffic, some machines have falsely advertised shorter routes causing traffic to pas through routes traffic wouldn't normally pass through. This time it was somewhere in Russia. This can be mitigated like most malicious acts / network errors if you write clever enough rules, but is hard because you have to identify the bad actors, or paths that lead to them.
- euske 9y agoSomeone should make a blockchain-based routing system.
- gtrubetskoy 9y agoThis is a well known "feature" (because it is not a bug) of BGP and every ISP worth their salt ought to be doing route filtering to prevent this sort of thing. If they're not, then the traffic can be diverted to Russia or the proverbial bit bucket rather trivially. I understand that less network savvy readers think this story is about Russia, but it really is about ISP's and the old issue of lazy network admins who do not filter routes and what happens. You can replace "Russia" with "Canada" and it wouldn't change the meaning. The country attribution is based on the AS (Autonomous System) registration. If these were really the malicious state actors, they'd probably use an AS registered in another country to cover their tracks. This is either an honest mistake or possibly a "let's see what would happen" prank.
- INTPenis 9y agoI just have to ask, not knowing how to setup BGP but having a lot of experience with PF and ipfw; is it not possible to create a sort of default deny filter so you only exclude the routes you have? The way your post read it sounded like you had to create a filter for all routes in the world but I assume that's not the case in the practical sense.
- gtrubetskoy 9y agoYou only need to create filters for the routes you know, e.g. if you are an ISP providing internet connectivity for company X, then you know that the only advertisement from the link to X can be for X and if the link to company X advertises routes from Google, Facebook or Apple AS's, then that's bogus. It's just tedious to do this, and a lot of providers, especially smaller ones don't bother with it.
- fosco 9y agocreating a list of 'expected' receive routes and expected 'send' routes is fairly easy to create. aka outbound and inbound prefix lists, I quickly googled and found the following config [0] that shows them 'advertising' their owned networks to prevent advertising networks they should not be and also accepting other networks they expect. this prevents and would have mitigated this sort of situation if implemented everywhere. no I do not believe this to be difficult and anyone configuring BGP should have some awareness of most of its tools. you can live your whole life without having to use a fire extinguisher or understanding the differences between a,b,c,d etc types but if you are a fire (man/woman) I expect you to understand which is used in what circumstance. if you do not you have the chance to spread a fire and make it worse then prevent it the same with someone who calls themself a network engineer. [0] https://supportforums.cisco.com/legacyfs/online/legacy/0/5/4/19450-bgp_config.txt https://supportforums.cisco.com/legacyfs/online/legacy/0/5/4...
- bawana 9y agobasically, a more specific routing address is used to direct packets through a specific route. In the earlier instance( the second example) Japan was the target. It is easy to see how the routing system in japan could have been crashed through such an overload (basically a ddos). Who would do that to Japan? China? Korea? In the more recent instance, all the traffic from google, facebook, apple, and other major players was routed through russia. Is this china making russia look evil? after all, if the traffic is going through russia, all russia has to do is turn off the power for that router to momentarily stop all traffic. or is this the NSA trying to #uck w russia and at the same time trying to create an incident so the fcc kills net neutrality to provide 'security'. This is state of the art espionage
- ryanmarsh 9y agoI always wonder how Russian people, either Russian Americans or Russian citizens, feel about all this Russia hysteria.
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- nasredin 9y agoPutin's approval rating is in the 80s. That should be enough to tell you what they think of you without looking at polls. (IIRC they were trying to shut down the one independent poll firm recently)