Dan York

What is the state of our routing infrastructure and what can be done to make it more secure and resilient?

In July 2010, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published a report on this topic called:

• Secure routing: State-of-the-art deployment and impact on network resilience

It begins with a paragraph that I think will resonate with most of us:

Reliable communications networks and services are now critical for public welfare and economic stability. Intentional attacks on the Internet, disruptions due to physical phenomena, software and hardware failures, and human mistakes all affect the proper functioning of public communications networks. Such disruptions reveal the increased dependence of our society on these networks and their services. A vital part of reliable communication networks is the routing infrastructure.

The report goes on at great length to report on the result of a survey of network operators within the European Union about the use of – or plans to use – secure routing technologies within their networks.  The report is quite useful in the background that it first provides around routing security concerns and some of the proposed solutions.  It then goes into a detailed analysis of the survey results.

While the data is now close to three years old (the interviews were in March/April 2010), many of the points are quite similar to more recent analyses.  A key point I noticed was this:

Overall, the lack of available knowledge and skills in routing security is recognised as a major barrier hindering further improvements in routing security, as became clear both from the online survey and the interviews.

Addressing this point by helping promote more awareness and education around routing security / resiliency is a primary aspect of our new Routing section here on Deploy360!

Overall the report makes for good reading if you are looking to understand more about the topic or “routing resiliency / security.”  There has been a good bit of progress made within some of the working groups mentioned since the time of the report, but the report still provides a solid foundation and background.

What are the actual frequency of routing security incidents? And what are the operational and economic impacts of such security incidents?

We all know that “routing security” incidents happen, but it’s hard to get a grasp on exactly what the situation is.  To that end, our colleagues in the Internet Society Standards and Technology team organized a “Routing Resiliency Measurements Workshop” in November 2012 to bring together participants from network operators, research labs, universities and vendors to explore what we can measure now – and what we need to do to start collecting more accurate measurements.  The team has now published a report:

• Report on Routing Resiliency Measurements Workshop

and our colleague Andrei Robachevsky has published some observations about the workshop.  As Andrei notes, the point of the workshop was to address three main questions:

1. What level of attack has there been in the past – to what extent do security incidents happen, but go unnoticed, or get dealt with inside a single network, possibly introducing collateral damage?
2. Are the number and impact of service disruptions and malicious activity stable, increasing, or decreasing?
3. Can we understand why, and track it collectively?

The report goes into some detail on what was discussed in the workshop and some of the approaches that were outlined.  As Andrei relays in his post, the workshop didn’t magically produce answers to all these questions… but it did lay the foundation for where more work needs to occur.

As we open up the new topic area of Routing Resiliency / Security here on Deploy360, we intend to bring you more information from workshops such as these… and ultimately more of the solutions and best operational practices that can lead to a more resilient and secure Internet.