BGP (in)security makes the AP wire

Tue May 11 13:34:10 UTC 2010

Is anyone going to jump on the irony of the last two paragraphs?  Having to use the excessively rigid, slow, static, boring expensive PSTN to fix the cool, fast, flexible cheap, cool, fun Internet?  That'll work just fine, of course. Until, that is, one of the telcos in the path saves a few bucks and routes a call leg over the Internet.  

What will us network operators do when there is NO out of band management path to anything?  What will happen when you can't even place a phone call?

The PSTN ran about 80 years or so on in-band signaling until a very rational cost/benefit decision was made to remove signaling from the traffic path.   Physically seperating signaling (SS7) and routing (LERG, etc) paths from the traffic (for all but the access link) was a large, expensive, difficult effort, but worth it.  The PSTN is full of quasi-governmental central authorities for everything, and is all the better for it.

At some point, the best-effort, cooperative, come-as-you-are paradigm that let the Internet grow fast and far will probably be overtaken by the societal need for reliable, deterministic, assured performance.   This thread has discussed only evolutionary, incremental improvements.  Who are the revolutionaries among us?  

MD

Steven Bellovin smb at cs.columbia.edu 
Sun May  9 13:32:57 UTC 2010 
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/08/business/AP-US-TEC-Fragile-Internet.html

It's a pretty reasonable article, too, though I don't know that I agree about the "simplicity of the routing system"....

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb