Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24

Thu Jan 15 14:44:21 UTC 2009

On Jan 15, 2009, at 3:54 AM, Andy Davidson wrote:
> On 14 Jan 2009, at 16:06, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>
>> Simon Lockhart wrote:
>>> (Yes, I'm in the minority that thinks that Randy hasn't done  
>>> anything bad)
>> Nah, I agree with Randy's experiment too. People should protect  
>> their networks better and this is clearly showing that there are a  
>> lot of vulnerable places in the core internet structure.
>
> The end sometimes justifies the means, and someone in the research  
> community discovering flaws in bgp implementation (software,  
> protocol, or process - at the bgp stack, in my NOC tools, in the  
> community's understanding) before hackers/spammers/fraudsters do,  
> then I count that as a result.

We disagree.

The 'researcher' does not get to decide whether the information gained  
by yelling fire to see how quickly people react is worth the risk of  
someone getting hurt, or even just missing the rest of the movie.

No reputable research institution's ethics committee would allow an  
"experiment" to proceed which announced a prefix in such a way that  
every network engineer on the planet would assume the prefix traveled  
through $ASN even though the prefix had not, and the researcher did  
not even notify $ASN of the experiment.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick