Earlier quoted context omitted.
cellphones ?
There's a trend to use VoIP on cellphones too (see LTE). So in the future this will not help at all.
@JohnLBevan this was not a DNS problem, but a BGP problem
NB Cannot reply under his post
Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
31–40 of 158 posts
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a network engineer, but it seems like the kind of thing that might be very hard to detect when you're already inside or near to the google.com domain. Or maybe CloudFlare just got there first. I don't think it's necessary to call BS on Cloudflare without any kind of evidence at all.
Stop excusing yourself for not being something, either read more and then comment or trust your gut feeling. (not meant to sound harsh)
I think it's good to qualify your opinion with your level of expertise. There's no rule that says HN should only be for discussion by experts (hopefully there never will be), and if you don't know something for sure it's best to say so that others don't take your word as gospel. That said, I'm no expert ;).
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#33There are some other ways to fix the problem.
Last time with the Youtube problem, they advertised more specific routes. If Pakistan was advertising a /24 network (255 IP addresses) Youtube started advertising two /25 networks (2x 128 addresses). Since they are more specific, they are preferred over the more broad routes. This prevents lack of cooperation, but not malicious behavior. As well, it ends somewhere because many networks will not pass routes smaller than say /24 or /28.
Most service providers also do 'inbound route filtering' to filter out any routes that they do not own. This isn't a simple process, which is why PCCW does not do it. Maybe a few more of these incidents and they will.
There's also AS Path filtering. This allows networks to be more granular in which paths they trust, by inspecting which AS's a route has gone through. If certain AS or AS path combinations become problematic, the internet at large could blackhole them or do manual route filtering. This would be laborious, but possible.
That said if someone can maliciously peer with an active BGP router, the damage to be done is significant. I haven't seen any outage reports from this type of attack, but I'm surprised by that.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#34And nothing will change. At least not until someone does this with malicious intent - script kiddie A knocks out big site, or a censoring state decides that it should block a free speech site from the entire Internet.
Evil routing has been employed a whole bunch of times going back decades, most visibly a couple of years ago when IIRC Iran (?) started advertising bad routes for a bunch of big sites, including Google
Pakistan null routed YouTube and accidentally took a big chunk down around the world in 2007.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#35Since I use DuckDuckGo for searches, I probably wouldn't notice this. Not receiving Gmail for a while wouldn't be noteworthy (at least for the first half hour or so).
I'm confused about the times the author gives, though. The article is dated today (11/6) and he says this happened 'today' at 6:24pm PST / 02:24 UTC. But unless I'm mistaken, that is a time currently in the future (http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?Pacific/d/-8/java). I guess he meant yesterday?
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moment people realize that the rogue network was being malicious, they'd stop trusting it - ignoring all announcements it might make. It might take a few hours for order to be restored, though.
Would it be possible to claim to own Google's IP, then on receiving the packets intended for Google forward them on to the real IP (without accidentally forwarding them back to yourself)? That way someone could hijack & interrogate these packets without being spotted (at least without causing service outage / only adding slight delay). Alternatively could they route these requests to a clone as an advanced phishing s…
That's what https is for. It should prevent them from doing anything useful with the packets.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#37“BGP is literally the glue of the Internet” - I think you’ll find BGP is figuratively the glue of the Internet ;)
I'm in this camp. To me, 'literally' has only one meaning. If it doesn't, the word loses all utility. He could say 'is essentially the glue', I suppose.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#38Since I use DuckDuckGo for searches, I probably wouldn't notice this. Not receiving Gmail for a while wouldn't be noteworthy (at least for the first half hour or so). I'm confused about the times the author gives, though. The article is dated today (11/6) and he says this happened 'today' at 6:24pm PST / 02:24 UTC. But unless I'm mistaken, that is a time currently in the future ( http://time.gov/timezone.cgi?Pacific/…
You're counting across the dateline, so for you it was 11/5.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a network engineer, but it seems like the kind of thing that might be very hard to detect when you're already inside or near to the google.com domain. Or maybe CloudFlare just got there first. I don't think it's necessary to call BS on Cloudflare without any kind of evidence at all.
This is basically correct. BGP is weird. The addresses for one of Google's many datacenters were routed incorrectly for packets coming from some subset of IP space. Unless Google is running active ping tests to that subset of IP space, the way they would normally detect it is for someone to call and complain. In this case, the author decided to take a shortcut and call the owner of the "problem peer" directly.
Although only a vanishingly small percentage of Google users can call and complain. Blog or tweet or post to HN and hope Matt Cutts sees it and notifies the right team, maybe.
Re: Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moment people realize that the rogue network was being malicious, they'd stop trusting it - ignoring all announcements it might make. It might take a few hours for order to be restored, though.
Would it be possible to claim to own Google's IP, then on receiving the packets intended for Google forward them on to the real IP (without accidentally forwarding them back to yourself)? That way someone could hijack & interrogate these packets without being spotted (at least without causing service outage / only adding slight delay). Alternatively could they route these requests to a clone as an advanced phishing s…
That is more or less the definition of a man in the middle attack. Hopefully if the website does something important(online banks, shopping, etc.), they have done something to mitigate that possibility.