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It’s crazy to me that the fundamental protocol running the entire internet is essentially based on the honor system... it is not working out well
by booi 7y ago
It’s crazy to me that the fundamental protocol running the entire internet is essentially based on the honor system... it is not working out well
- Icathian 7y agoBorder Gateway Protocol is just one routing protocol, calling it "the fundamental protocol" is stretching a point. That award probably goes to TCP. Maybe IPv4.
- kortilla 7y agoBorder gateway protocol is the only routing protocol to get prefixes reachable to the wider internet.
- tlb 7y agoIPv4 and v6 run on the honor system too, in that the sender can supply any source address they like. TCP connection setup is the lowest layer that makes it nontrivial to spoof a sender.
- Groxx 7y agoThe ability to do this is effectively what enables DNS traffic amplification attacks (and others). Trust has been broadly effective, but also quite damaging at times. It's part of why I'm glad https is nigh universal - http's trust allowed stuff like Firesheep and all the hotel shit-injection that used to be so prevalent.
- mox1 7y agoI mean no BGP no global internet...just local lans and wans.
- iso1210 7y agoBGP didn't start major inroads into the internet until the mid 90s. RIP can't cope with the scale of the internet today, but to say BGP is essential to interconnecting networks is not right
- jlgaddis 7y agoHuh? If you take away BGP, there is no Internet! No other protocol in existence/use today can scale the way BGP has.
- danharaj 7y agoAll things considered it is working out pretty well.
- tialaramex 7y agoThe world's financial systems depend heavily on trust too. Take credit cards. As an end user you perceive some fairly heavyweight albeit imperfect security, but in reality there are two parallel systems and only one of them is using those security features. Authorisation is the part that ties your good name to your transactions. The bank doesn't trust you, so considerable technological effort is used in Authorisation. Chip cards, PINs, extra passwords and codes for web transactions, that's all Authorization. Settlement moves money between your account and a merchant account. This isn't secured at all, it's just based on trust. Any merchant can assert that you used your card to pay them any amount and by default the bank takes it on trust. Authorisation is abuse resistant. If you try to replay the same authorization multiple times it doesn't work. Settlement doesn't care. If a worker messes up and puts a big merchant's daily settlement transactions through twice, every single one of those transactions just happens again. Paid $80 for groceries leaving $38 in the account until pay day? Sorry, now you're $42 overdrawn. This really happens. If you complain they'll fix it. If hundreds of customers complain they'll realize the error and fix it for everyone. But this is why you have to check your credit card bill. Sooner or later there will be errors, and if you don't check you'll never see them which can get expensive fast.
- dx034 7y agoFinancial institutions are much more heavily regulated by governments than ISPs. The honor system in finance only works because regulators ensure (today more so than a few decades ago) that all players fulfill minimum requirements.
- buran77 7y agoOn the other hand see how double spending works in less regulated financial markets like cryptocurrency. What keeps that honor system working in financial systems is that it's backed by strong regulation and strong supervisory authorities. There are so many controls built into this that mistakes happen less often than one might think, considering the volume of non-bank transactions (think billions++, yearly). ISPs have noting of the kind. One routing mistake (or "mistake") and all of your customers' data suddenly went through China, Russia, US (you name it), for better or worse. What's worse, in a manner of speaking that data is now devalued. There's value date equivalent in the ISP's world. As a customer you have no avenues, the thing isn't even between you and any ISP you may work with. The bank will never get away with telling you "well we accidentally made this extra payment, it got routed thorough this extra bank, so now you lost 25% of the money".
- q3k 7y agoMostly in the US, where filters (if any) are set up by mailing eachother deadtree LOAs about party A allowing party B to announce their prefix. It's basically the checkbook way of doing things, but for BGP. Meanwhile in EMEA we've been using IRR (and recently RPKI) for automating filters for years now. I couldn't do a BGP hijack through my EU upstreams even if I wanted to.
- dylz 7y agoRPKI in ARIN space is questionably annoying to do. I still haven't been able to add anything to my new allocations. As a bonus, my US upstream doesn't care if I have RPKI/ROA/IRR - even if I do, they ask for dead tree LOA anyway. When I sent a dead tree to one of my EU upstreams out of habit they were like "what do I need this for?"
- kitteh 7y agoARINs RPKI APIs could use some love, that's for sure.
- icedchai 7y agoIt's actually working out amazing well, seeing it has barely changed in over 25 years!
- commandlinefan 7y agoWhen the internet really started to become a big "thing" in the mid-90's and I started learning how it all worked I thought, "well, as soon as hackers realize how insecure this whole thing is, that'll be the end of that..."
- kitteh 7y agoCogent and Level3 weren't filtering their own customer. This is what happens when large companies say prefix list updates / validation is too much of a burden and allow customers to run bareback BGP. That said, Cogent is going to be doing RPKI on customers soon so that's good. As for Level 3 the world wonders.
- jlgaddis 7y agoRostelecom (AS12389) is directly connected to Level3 (AS3356) and announced the hijacked routes to them but Level3 filtered them out. But... AS12389 announced them to Rascom (AS20764), who accepted them and sent them on to Cogent (AS174), who accepted them and propogated them on to Level3 (AS3356), who, unfortunately, then accepted them from Cogent. The AS path would've been much longer than if Level3 had accepted them directly from AS12389 so, at the least, the actual effects of the hijacking weren't as bad as they could have been.