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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

#141

Post by Jiro »

freeflight wrote: post #125
winternett wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Encryption being applied to every site as a requirement is relatively new since google made it a requirement in Chrome. Previously it was only required for secured transactions like purchases and working on health care records etc... And very rightfully so. Now Google Chrome flags even simple (informational) sites for not being encrypted, and (quite possibly) rightfully so because of the potential for tracking/a…

> Security is best when it is uniform So when web traffic is uniformly not encrypted that's more secure than if it is encrypted by varying degrees and implementations? Tbh your complaint reads along the lines of "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". SSL may not be perfect, but it sure as hell is better than running pretty much the whole web in the clear. Particularly as pretty much all of your complaints do not real…

>Both of which are things you can personally change something about.

No, because "how Chrome surfaces a lack of SSL" is about your users' Chrome, not your own instance of Chrome. You cannot personally change the Chrome that is run by your users.

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

#142

Post by betterunix2 »

fragmede wrote: post #126
toast0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead. These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many 'redundant fibers' are in the same strand, and last mile is…

I wonder if I can nerdsnipe anyone into figuring out the fewest BGP hijacks it would take to force traffic on the Internet from the West Coast of the US to take the long way around to the East Coast of the US. Never mind the latency, that pipe isn't big enough for all of that traffic, so it'll effectively be a netsplit. I bet it's a lower number than anyone's actually comfortable with, though it would be rather diffi…

I doubt that you could force all such traffic to be so routed, given that there are coast-to-coast transit networks that would not be affected by a BGP hijack (IGP routes are often preferred to EGP routes). In all likelihood the situation would not last very long as network operators would quickly respond to the anomalous traffic pattern and deploy various route filters to correct the problem.

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

#143

Post by balaji1 »

chasd00 wrote: post #138

You know what? I get the feeling that _everything_ is held together with only spit and baling wire.

I get the same feeling too. And maybe that's fine. We are led to believe that we are over-reliant on a particular things like the internet or the shipping supply chain but we probably are not.

Most modern, massive systems seem that held with only spit and baling wire. This might not be true for infra like roads, bridges and dams. And there are things, buildings and structures that are 10s or 100s of years old that still work. Power plants and cars for example.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

kingcharles wrote: post #94
toast0 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the 90s when I got on, so much of traffic was exchanged at MAE-West or MAE-East, and a backhoe in Iowa could make nearly all the cross-US traffic go through Europe and Asia instead. These days, there are lively public internet exchanges up and down both coasts, in texas and chicago and elsewhere. A well placed backhoe can still make a big mess, many 'redundant fibers' are in the same strand, and last mile is…

God, this would happen all the time in the mid-90s. You joke about a backhoe in Iowa, but I'm pretty certain it was a backhoe in Iowa one time. Then the whole of the UK's traffic to the USA West Coast would be routed through an ISDN connection in Korea for three days. Your goat porn downloads from Usenet would drop from their high of 0.5Kb/sec and you'd be left with your dick in your hand. Or something.

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by inopinatus »

unethical_ban wrote: post #81
throw0101a wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet. "A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider: * https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers: * https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers And there are several different major global providers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

I didn't RTFM but I could see the argument that the SPOFs of the Internet are AWS, Cloudflare and Google, not the cables and routers in an IXP.

Those are not single points.

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

#146

Post by ClumsyPilot »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #100
avgcorrection wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said “If I operate a machine shop”. So presumably just another programmer making up an analogy with insufficient background knowledge so that we can nitpick the details of it.

Presumably. Those statements would be insulting to most professional machinists, carpenters and others who take good care of the tools/infrastructure that provide their job and keeps their digits in place. To not speak of an actual industrial facility producing high-quality or high-volume items. In fact, so much care is put into infrastructure that most people/shops have lots of tools they have designed and built the…

I don't know why yo'd make arguments by analogy, which are flawed by default, on a topic you are not versed in

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

#147

Post by inopinatus »

topdancing wrote: post #110
throw0101a wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remove a few hubs and you have disabled a large portion of the internet. "A few hubs"? Just Hurricane Electric has presence in many, many IXPs, and they're not even the largest transit provider: * https://bgp.he.net/AS6939#_ix AT&T, the largest transit provider, has a ridiculous number of peers: * https://bgp.he.net/AS7018#_peers And there are several different major global providers: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

Knock out this set of buildings in London, and you can kiss the entirety of the UK offline/most of Europe won't recover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telehouse_Europe

It took exactly one (1) spanning tree misconfiguration on a single BlackDiamond to cripple LINX for hours, a couple of decades ago.

Source: I was sitting next to the person who fixed it.

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

#148

Post by inopinatus »

IncRnd wrote: post #18
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 t…

These are not ideologies, but compatible principles from separate concerns. One relates to protocol errors, the other to information validation & verification.

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

#149

Post by lioeters »

azeirah wrote: post #72
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.

If Alan Kay is to be believed (which I hope he is!) then the internet was originally inspired by multicellular lifeforms. I'd say the internet has some sort of a "biological" architecture. Robust in the sense that organisms are robust; extremely messy, sensical from a high-level view, chaotic from a low-level view.

That's an interesting point about how the Internet has a kind of "biological architecture", whose chaotic and self-organizing nature makes it robust and resilient.

It's the same quality that's claimed by proponents of "decentralized autonomous organizations" (DAO), though for that I'm not yet convinced of its practicality.

Someone on this thread mentioned the book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

> Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

This reminds me of the concept of "emergence" in living systems.

> the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

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

#150

Post by jrochkind1 »

> However, the additional integrity RPKI brings also comes with a fair amount of added complexity and cost, the researchers found.

I wish our government spent billions on funding open source software to reduce that complexity and cost, instead of on introducing/hoarding vulnerabilities.

This is an appropriate task for government funding. (even better yet, multi-lateral/international funding). Nobody else is going to provide the resources to get it done. Clearly.

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