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2010-05-09 10:06:50
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson, Ap Technology Writer
Sat May 8, 10:33 am ET
NEW YORK In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the
Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused
online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the Bush administration concluded
that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest."
Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation.
The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are
innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to
spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the
Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could
disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run
normally.
The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed
between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called
"hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on
destruction. Instead the outages are a problem borne out of the open nature of
the Internet, a quality that also has stimulated the Net's dazzling growth.
"It's ugly when you look under the cover," says Earl Zmijewski, a general
manager at Renesys Corp., which tracks the performance of Internet data routes.
"It amazes me every day when I get into work and find it's working."
When you send an e-mail, view a Web page or do anything else online, the
information you read and transmit is handed from one carrier of Internet data
to another, sometimes in a long chain. When you log into Facebook, your data
might be handed from your Internet service provider to a company such as Level
3 Communications Inc., which operates a global network of fiber-optic lines
that carry Internet data across long distances. It, in turn, might pass the
data to a carrier that's connected directly to Facebook's server computers.
The crux of the problem is that each carrier along the way figures out how to
route the data based only on what the surrounding carriers in the chain say,
rather than by looking at the whole path. It's as if a driver had to get from
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh without a map, navigating solely by traffic signs he
encountered along the way but the signs weren't put up by a central
authority. If a sign pointed in the wrong direction, that driver would get
lost.
That's essentially what happens when an Internet route gets hijacked. Because
carriers pass information between themselves about where data should go and
this system has no secure, automatic means of verifying that the routing
information is correct data can be routed to some carrier that isn't
expecting the information. The carrier doesn't know what to do with it, and
usually just drops it. It falls into a "black hole."
On April 25, 1997, millions of people in North America lost access to all of
the Internet for about an hour. The hijacking was caused by an employee
misprogramming a router, a computer that directs data traffic, at a small
Internet service provider.
A similar incident happened elsewhere the next year, and the one after that.
Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world,
often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Last
month a Chinese Internet service provider halted access from around the world
to a vast number of sites, including Dell.com and CNN.com, for about 20
minutes.
In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent
access to YouTube from the country and intentionally "black-holed" requests for
YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the
international carrier upstream from it that "I'm the best route to YouTube, so
send all YouTube traffic to me." The upstream carrier accepted the routing
message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started
sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even
Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and
skateboarding dogs for a few hours.
In 2004, the flaw was put to malicious use when someone got a computer in
Malaysia to tell Internet service providers that it was part of Yahoo Inc. A
flood of spam was sent out, appearing to come from Yahoo.
"Hijacking is very much like identity theft. Someone in the world claims to be
you," said Todd Underwood, who worked for Renesys during the Pakistan Telecom
hijacking. He now works for Google Inc., trying to prevent hijacking of its
websites, which include YouTube.
In 2003, the Bush administration's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board
assembled a "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace" that concluded that it was
vital to fix the routing system and make sure the "traffic signs" always point
in the right direction.
But unlike Internet bugs that get discovered and fixed relatively quickly, the
routing system has been unreformed for more than a decade. And while there's
some progress being made, there's little industry-wide momentum behind efforts
to introduce a permanent remedy. Data carriers regard the fallibility of the
routing system as the price to be paid for the Internet's open, flexible
structure. The simplicity of the routing system makes it easy for service
providers to connect, a quality that has probably helped the explosive growth
of the Internet.
That growth has also increased the risks exponentially. Fifteen years ago,
maybe 8,000 people in the world had access to computers that use the Border
Gateway Protocol, or BGP, which defines how carriers pass routing information
to each other. Now, Danny McPherson, chief security officer at Arbor Networks,
believes that with the growth of Internet access across the world and the
attendant increase in the number of carriers, that figure is probably closer to
1 million people.
Peiter Zatko, a member of the "hacker think tank" called the L0pht, told
Congress in 1998 that he could use the BGP vulnerability to bring down the
Internet in half an hour. In recent years, Zatko who now works for the
Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has said the exploit
would still work. However, it would likely take a few hours rather than 30
minutes, partly because a greater number of Internet carriers would need to be
hit.
Plenty of solutions have been proposed in the Internet engineering community,
going back as far as 1995. The U.S. government has supported these efforts,
spurred in part by the Bush administration's 2003 strategy statement. That has
resulted in some trials of new technology, but adoption by data carriers still
appears distant. And the federal government doesn't have any direct authority
to force changes.
One reason is that the weaknesses in the system are in the routing between
carriers. It doesn't help if one carrier introduces a new system every one it
connects with has to make the change as well.
"It's kind of everybody's problem, because it impacts the stability of the
Internet, but at the same time it's nobody's problem because nobody owns it,"
says Doug Maughan, who deals with the issue at the Department of Homeland
Security.
The big Internet carriers seem willing to accept the status quo. Spokesmen at
AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., two of the largest, world-spanning
carriers of Internet traffic, said they were unable to find anyone at their
companies who could discuss the issue of routing reform.
Pieter Poll, the chief technology officer at Qwest Communications International
Inc., says that he would support some simple mechanisms to validate data
routes, but he argues that fundamental reform isn't necessary. Hijackings are
typically corrected quickly enough that they don't pose a major threat, he
argues.
One fix being tested would stop short of making the routing system fully secure
but would at least verify part of it. Yet this system also worries carriers
because they would have to work through a central database.
"My fear is that innovation on the Internet would slow down if there's a need
to go through a central authority," Poll says. "I see little appetite for that
in the industry."
Jeffrey Hunker, a former senior director for critical infrastructure in the
Clinton administration, says he's not surprised that little has happened on the
issue since 2003. He doesn't expect much to happen in the next seven years,
either.
"The only thing that's going to drive adoption is a major incident, which we
haven't had yet," he says. "But there's plenty of evidence out there that a
major incident would be possible."
In the meantime, network administrators deal with hijacking an old-fashioned
way: calling their counterparts close to where the hijacking is happening to
get them to manually change data routes. Because e-mails may not arrive if a
route has been hijacked, the phone is a more reliable option, says Tom Daly,
chief technical officer of Dynamic Network Services Inc., which provides Web
hosting and other Internet services.
"You make some phone calls and hope and pray," Daly says. "That's about it."