The i-root china reroute finally makes fox news. And congress.

Wed Nov 17 06:46:44 UTC 2010

On Nov 16, 2010, at 8:17 PM, Fred Baker wrote:
>> http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/16/internet-traffic-reportedly-routed-chinese-servers/
> 
> I have read the article and the list, and I'm puzzled. It's pretty clear that the root gets its records from a common source, and that the copies of them being delivered by a given root server were different.

Hard to decipher what the Fox report is actually talking about, but I suspect it relates to http://www.renesys.com/blog/2010/06/two-strikes-i-root.shtml

> Not sure what Glenn Beck, Fox News, or Godwin's Law have to do with it. There was a technical event that resulted in misrouting of traffic, and while international concerns regarding it had political overtones, the technical event is not a political one. If it was your traffic that had been misrouted, you might have issued expressions of concern. So why respond to it with a political response?

As for political vs. technical, it feels (particularly given the Fox report is sourced from a paper on US-China relations) like yet more cyber war drum beating, but that might just be me.

> Sounds to me like one of the arguments for DNSSEC deployment...

DNSSEC would let you know something odd happened (if you're doing a DNS lookup, have validation turned on, and can tell the difference between SERVFAIL generated stub resolver timeout and a random Internet brokenness), although it doesn't really give you any tools to fix it.  What really needs to be fixed is "routing by rumor".

Regards,
-drc