The Big Cloud Providers Try To Shore Up Internet Routing Security

MANRS Mutters, “Your Routing’s A Mess!”

The big names in Cloud services including, but not limited to, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Akamai, and Netflix have announced a project to tame the current insecure mess which is routing on the internet.  As it stands a connection may wander throughout the world before arriving at it’s intended destination which greatly increases the opportunity for someone to intercept or redirect you to a site other than the one you intended to connect to.

This is because the infrastructure was not designed in a cooperative manner, instead each of the roughly 60,000 network operators that make up the global internet have done whatever fits their process best at the time.  Your poor packet may end up on a trip which traverses many of these networks simply because it thought that was the quickest route at the time, or because a gatekeeper redirected it.  Your UDP packets might still be doing an impression of Charlie on the MTA. 

The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security group has standards for filtering, anti-spoofing, and behind the scenes the over 300 members coordinate their efforts and validate they have been applied and are effective.   We can hope that they have hit a tipping point where it is better to apply for membership to this group and applying the standard to their own services than to continue to go on your own.

The Register minds MANRS closely here.