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Security: DNS and BGP Provide Shaky Foundation for Today’s Internet
Two foundations of the Internet are DNS and BGP. The Domain Name System (DNS) determines where information will flow. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) determines the route taken to deliver the information. The problem is that these systems were designed at a time where there wasn’t much thought to security. As trust-based systems they have become targets for exploitation by hackers who have been able to capture, alter and redirect the flow of information.
Attacks against Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Domain Name System (DNS) have become prevalent. It’s been called BGP poisoning, and it has been known about for many years. For example, in 2008 Pakistan tried blocking access to YouTube within their country but unintentionally took YouTube offline globally. Researchers suggest that it may even be possible for a relatively simple botnet cyberweapon to target BGP vulnerabilities and take the entire internet down.
Geoff Huston, chief scientist at the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), told Juha Saarinen of itNews that “is it serious? Of course. Do folks take it seriously? Of course not. It would be good to say that the ISP industry is acutely aware of the issues here and is enthusiastically supporting initiatives to build up the level of security in the routing system and to prevent the ease with which these attacks can be undertaken. But it would be a lie in every respect.”
And BGP’s problems aren’t just limited to hacking. Problems started cropping up last August with BGP and older router hardware. Routers started to reach an overflow capacity for the number of route entries of the BGP table that they were able store. Many older routers had a maximum capacity of 512K entries. The overflow resulted in a number of connection problems.
Some proposals, like BGPsec, are designed to be much more secure. But it may be some time before newer proposals are approved and implemented.
