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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

#41

Post by lliamander »

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…

Breathe

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

#42

Post by oneepic »

winternett wrote: post #23

And Google requiring (costly and/or time consuming) SSL certs to be applied on all sites to "ensure security" was also a big industry money making nightmare for many independent (non-income-driven) sites that is still playing out badly, and not providing much more security. Two factor authentication and account verification is really an elaborate corporate sham to get people's phone numbers and PII for free. It doesn…

Honest question (IT/security noob) -- why does it not provide that much more security? I like verifying that my traffic is going where I want.

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

winternett wrote: post #23

And Google requiring (costly and/or time consuming) SSL certs to be applied on all sites to "ensure security" was also a big industry money making nightmare for many independent (non-income-driven) sites that is still playing out badly, and not providing much more security. Two factor authentication and account verification is really an elaborate corporate sham to get people's phone numbers and PII for free. It doesn…

[deleted]

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

#44

Post by winternett »

fulafel wrote: post #26
winternett wrote: post #23

And Google requiring (costly and/or time consuming) SSL certs to be applied on all sites to "ensure security" was also a big industry money making nightmare for many independent (non-income-driven) sites that is still playing out badly, and not providing much more security. Two factor authentication and account verification is really an elaborate corporate sham to get people's phone numbers and PII for free. It doesn…

Deprecating unencrypted HTTP is a big systemic improvement even though some individual sites may not benefit much. It's a network effect. (What's the money grab given free let's encrypt certs?)

Lets encrypt from what I understand require time consuming updates every few months. My host provider also does not allow me to install them manually, further complicating the process, and conveniently they sell certs for $125 a year... Per site. It's been a thorn in my side because we're too big to easily move now.

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

#45

Post by hunterb123 »

teddyh wrote: post #14
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.

Which funny enough, are the only parts that really go down all at once.

When the internet has troubles it's a mistake of a giant centralized service.

Most of the time only that service is affected by their own mistakes, but sometimes that service hosts a lot of others, or is so massive that they cause DDoS attacks like when Facebook went down and their clients spammed DNS servers.

Seems the internet is fine. Centralized services not so much.

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

#46

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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.

back in the 90s all the Internet traffic in Italy was routed around two big hubs, hosted in two public universities (it was mainly one, in Rome).

Internet is much more reliable now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GARR

I studied CS in Rome at "La Sapienza" and I was merely 10 steps away from INFN (national institute for nuclear physics) where GARR phisically resided.

I spent more time there than in my class.

That's how I got involved in this new "internet thing".

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

#47

Post by SahAssar »

> “LEVEL 3 is the last IRR operator which allows the use of this method, although they have discouraged its use since at least 2012,” Korab told KrebsOnSecurity. “Other IRR operators have fully deprecated MAIL-FROM.”

I'd prefer if we kept deprecated and removed as two different terms. It sounds like level3 deprecated it, and everyone else removed it. To me (and most definitions I can find) deprecated basically means "don't start using it, if you are using it stop using it, we will remove it soon but have not done so yet for compatibility reasons"

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

#48

Post by AceyMan »

zwkrt wrote: post #8
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.

Unless you exist in a state of wild over abundance and are very conscientious, most working infrastructure is always at a state of almost-disrepair. If I operate a machine shop and I have 4 partially-stripped screwdrivers, I might get a new one, but inevitably I will use it until it is as stripped as all the rest, and I don’t dare throw away a tool that is currently even in partially working condition since I might n…

A corollary to this might be "a new part on the shelf is not truly 'better' than a 90% worn out one still in service."

Having ready spares is great but I'm sure the HN crowd knows how much crib-death there is on new, replacement bits of all kinds.

Until it's actually been run-in for a while how do you really know it's going to work when you unbox it to replace a truly dead piece?

The upshot of this is' RAID-6' type designs are the most reliable in the real world since when one fails at least you are leaning on other parts that have been run-in and are past the leading edge of the bathtub curve.

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

#49

Post by winternett »

shadowgovt wrote: post #36
switch007 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up, monitoring and maintaining LE isn't free

But monitoring and maintenance are things someone needs to do if they operate a site, period.

But if you're independently running, paying for, and managing multiple sites, it's a HUGE burden. It also kills innovation for independent devs and startups, and dramatically raises the cost/investment threshold for this kind of innovation.

Pricing on cert services is also far too high when everyone's concern and agreement should be security as a basis for operations. It's not something that should be an upcharge or income opportunity.

You buy a door lock for your home once, and it works as long as you don't compromise the key. If you buy a house, door locks are expected to come with the house in most circumstances.

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

#50

Post by cblconfederate »

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?

blockchains are one
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