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Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#61
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times does this have to happen before China's privileges to do things like this get revoked? At this point, it can't be just a mistake and must be some state-sponsored hacking. Seems like a great way to find out where a particular Spotify user's IP address is.

What are you going to do? Divide the internet in half? I say that in a joking way but it’s a possibility.

There is already a wall. This may be a case of something leaking through it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#62

Hi all - Seth from Google here. Our team is aware and we are working on mitigation. In short, a third party telco provider is advertising on one of our IP blocks. Unfortunately that's all the information I can share at this time.

EDIT: This is a general statement, I am not complaining to google here. This kind of thing should not be possible. Are there any protocol proposals or other kind of upgrades to the routing protocols that would prevent these kind of mistakes/attacks?

There are a lot of proposals but the problem is quite difficult to begin with and also involves centralizing policy. And then the chosen protocol has to be implemented by parties that tend to move at a glacial pace.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#64
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many times does this have to happen before China's privileges to do things like this get revoked? At this point, it can't be just a mistake and must be some state-sponsored hacking. Seems like a great way to find out where a particular Spotify user's IP address is.

What are you going to do? Divide the internet in half? I say that in a joking way but it’s a possibility.

You don’t need to cut the internet in half to limit China to routing IP adresses that are allocated to China.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#65
post #40

Reading through the comments here I'm recognizing "China Telecom" from an article on a BGP hijack that was published about a week ago, I still had the article open in my browser: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/stran... In another comment in this thread I read: > Seems like its time to start or accelerate a working group on secure BGP. Indeed things can't go on like this for much longer...

I kept getting SSH bruteforce attempts from IPs on China Telecom a while back. Wonder what they're up to...

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#66
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: This is a general statement, I am not complaining to google here. This kind of thing should not be possible. Are there any protocol proposals or other kind of upgrades to the routing protocols that would prevent these kind of mistakes/attacks?

I am surprised how fragile is the internet given how our society is increasingly becoming critically reliant on it.

On the other hand it's not that fragile everywhere and for everyone. When ISP markets are not monopolized and the service doesn't rely on a big cloud - much fewer users will get rerouted through random countries and the service itself can failover to properly working datacenters, tolerating all those BGP misdesigns.

It's if the internet doesn't like all that centralization with all that market domination. It's naturally resilient only when there is a lot of competition.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#67
I hate to break it to everyone, but the technology to filter this sorta thing has existed for a very long time, but people often don't use it. Most of the time this sort of thing is accidental (IE: operator error)so a lot of operators kinda ignore it. Check out "IRR Power Tools" if you're interested.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#68
post #19

Despite the subdomain, the IP for ChinaTelecom-gw.transtelecom.net (217.150.59.249) seems to be based in Russia, as does the carrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransTelekom

Seems likely to be TT's gateway to CT. New theory: TransTelecom brought up a new gateway to ChinaTelecom, which incorrectly gossiped all advertisements from ChinaTelecom. This caused a leak, since CT has bgp highjacking of Google IP ranges for the GFW within China, but ordinarily doesn't leak them outside the country. TransTelecom misconfigured the gateway to broadcast everything advertised by ChinaTelecom, bringing…

That's a pretty good theory.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#69
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you going to do? Divide the internet in half? I say that in a joking way but it’s a possibility.

You don’t need to cut the internet in half to limit China to routing IP adresses that are allocated to China.

IIRC, Google can try to dictate a BGP policy that says not to accept any routes that goes through China. However, without any verification checks (via cryptography), an entity can lie about the path that they are advertising.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google Compute down?

#70
post #8

Google IPs seem to be being routed to China for us. We have servers in San Jose that cannot access Google services. Trace route shows everything going to China when leaving the San Jose data center. We can access the same services from Vancouver just fine.

Related to https://twitter.com/thousandeyes/status/1062102171506765825
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