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The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#11

Post by setpatchaddress »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #3
ragingrobot wrote: post #2

O'Brien: I'm afraid to touch anything. It's all cross-circuited and patched together - I can't make head nor tails of it. Bashir: Sounds like one of your repair jobs. Seriously though, it seems like every form of infrastructure we rely on is held together in such a fragile manner. I hate hate to think of the chaos should there be a major Internet and physical infra failure in close proximity, time-wise.

We have a pretty good track record keeping it running though; The Internet has never gone down! I'd be far more concerned with agricultural logistics, though we've never starved to extinction, either. Perhaps we've reached a point of positive no return: We can no longer cease to exist!

We absolutely can. Imagine a US president outwardly Trump-like but who was also a True Believer instead of a cynical, mentally-ill real estate huckster. They would have the unilateral capability to start a global nuclear war. And they might actively desire to do this, on the basis of religious delusion (“it’s time for armageddon!”).

We are frighteningly close to this scenario in 2025. It’s a bad idea to assume that the gop candidate will be a fascist-wannabe in on the joke (someone like desantis or cruz). We can survive run-of-the-mill fascism, although it won’t be fun. But it could instead be someone truly existentially dangerous.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#12

Post by throwawaysea »

I am not a security expert, but this article seems to just be saying that the Internet is held together by trust, convention, and an ever-evolving set of technologies. In the case of Level3 (now Lumen), it seems they did not deprecate an insecure method that others already deprecated. And it seems that better technologies are on the horizon (RPKI) but not yet fully in use. To me this doesn't feel as bad as "spit and baling wire". We could be more secure by holding everyone to a stricter standard on adopting newer, more secure technologies. But is it really as broken as the title suggests? I don't think so.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#13

Post by paxys »

fredophile wrote: post #7
h2odragon wrote: post #6

It's Anti-Fragile. If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds, mechanisms for fail over are in place and regularly tested, and there's whole classes of corner case bugs that get flushed out to be stomped (or nurtured as cherished pets) instead of breeding in the dark and jumping out at you all at once. How can the "Internet routes around failure" be trusted without…

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

What original topology are you talking about? There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#14

Post by teddyh »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #10

What are some other/better proposals for how to organize a world-wide network? This is one area where I have not seen many articles. But admittedly, I'm probably not looking in the right places. Any suggestions?

You could ask Cloudflare or Google and they would probably say that they should run it all.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#15

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

paxys wrote: post #13
fredophile wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

What original topology are you talking about? There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.

If you have a cable connection today, you can serve reliably just fine. Throughput isn’t the best and there are other minor issues, but it’s reliable enough for most people’s purposes.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#16

Post by oblib »

I've been leaning on my app's users to do what they need to do on their end to implement offline/local first use of the app and they just do not get it. For them the only issues they've had were connection issue on their end with their service providers so they don't feel this is an issue of concern.

But I read stuff like this, and in this case it's Krebs, so I have to expect these kinds of issues will pop up. The article mentions the FB outage and most everyone on my FB feed was freaking out over not being able to access it, and for the most part it's not a critical service. And when they came back online some of the conspiracies they were sharing about what/why it happened were way over the top.

From my perspective it feels like everything on the internet is just one missed tap on a keyboard from breaking.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#17

Post by throwawayboise »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #11
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a pretty good track record keeping it running though; The Internet has never gone down! I'd be far more concerned with agricultural logistics, though we've never starved to extinction, either. Perhaps we've reached a point of positive no return: We can no longer cease to exist!

We absolutely can. Imagine a US president outwardly Trump-like but who was also a True Believer instead of a cynical, mentally-ill real estate huckster. They would have the unilateral capability to start a global nuclear war. And they might actively desire to do this, on the basis of religious delusion (“it’s time for armageddon!”). We are frighteningly close to this scenario in 2025. It’s a bad idea to assume that t…

Since we're imagining things, imagine a befuddled geriatric sock puppet president installed via fraud and controlled by a globalist cabal with a stated desire to depopulate the planet.

See how crazy that sounds?

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#18

Post by IncRnd »

HPsquared wrote: post #4

Held together with spit and baling wire as it is, the fact that it mostly works proves that the overall architecture is robust.

> proves that the overall architecture is robust.

Not really. What it shows is the stark difference between two ideologies. The first camp contains people who believe in Postel's Law, "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others". The second camp has people who recognize that the current world is not a cooperative network of researchers: "all input is untrusted".

Krebs is absolutely in the second camp.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#19

Post by imchillyb »

Has no one here seen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/

There are 1000s of these pictures.

The entire world's IT infrastructure has been held together with spaghetti-noodle-cabling and bodged patches for over three decades now. I'm even guilty of it. Most IT guys are guilty of it.

Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids and bubblegum. Software that more than 5 different teams have had their fingers in, mucking about, and some codebases have orders of magnitude more than that.

Anyone that didn't know this, doesn't pay attention, or just started internetting.

Re: The internet is held together with spit and baling wire

#20

Post by Teever »

paxys wrote: post #13
fredophile wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The internet routes around failure" hasn't been true for a long time. It refers to the original topography which has been replaced with a hub and spoke model. Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet.

What original topology are you talking about? There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.

> There was never a time when your end consumer device could be used as even a semi-reliable web server.

I dunno man, My used T420 laptop is serving several sites over a residential symmetrical fiber connection just fine.

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