The Infrastructure Mess Causing Countless Internet Outages

'Border Gateway Protocol has served the internet well for decades. But
when it goes wrong, you notice it. From a report:

In a weeks-long stretch in 2014, hackers stole thousands of dollars a
day in cryptocurrency from owners. In 2017, internet outages cropped
up around the United States for hours. Last year, Google Cloud
suffered hours of disruptions. Earlier this month, a large swath of
European mobile data was rerouted through the state-backed China
Telecom. And on Monday, websites and services around the world --
including the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare -- experienced
hours of outages. These incidents may sound different, but they
actually all resulted from problems -- some accidental, some malicious
-- with a fundamental internet routing system called the Border
Gateway Protocol. The web is distributed, but it's also
interconnected. It needs to be so that data can move around worldwide
without all being controlled by a single entity. So every time you
load a website or send an email, BGP is the system responsible for
optimizing the route that data takes across these sprawling,
intertwined networks. And when it goes wrong, the whole internet feels
it.

Originally conceived in 1989 (on two napkins), the version of BGP used
today remains largely unchanged since 1994. And though BGP has scaled
surprisingly well, there's no denying that the internet is very
different than it was 25 years ago. In fact, the way BGP was designed
introduces risk of outages, manipulations, and data interception --
all of which have come to pass. The internet's backbone routers --
massive industrial nodes usually run by internet service providers,
not the Linksys at your house -- each control a set of IP addresses
and routes. ISPs and other large organizations use BGP to announce
these routes to the world and calculate paths. Think of it like
planning a cross-country drive: You need to know the different route
options in each area, so you can stop at all the right corn mazes and
the world's largest rocking chair without adding too much extra
driving each day. But if your GPS is outdated, you could wind up at a
dead end or on a new road that totally bypasses the salt flats.'

-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/07/01/1316206

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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