Operator survey: Incrementally deployable secure Internet routing

Tue Jan 25 16:10:32 UTC 2022

Hi Scott

> "Do you use countries as ISDs? Doesn't that create opportunities for
government intervention and censorship?
> I asked about the ISDs and put a FAQ you have as an example.  I didn't
ask about the SBAS.  It seems to me that the ingress/egress of an ISD is
the place a government surveillance network would reside.  All country
internet communications go through a chokepoint to get on the SBAS, so it's
easier to surveil the population.  Especially if you envision the ISD to
have its own DNS.

You're referring to the FAQ on page 409 of the SCION book:
https://www.scion-architecture.net/pdf/SCION-book.pdf
The following question in the book is about government censorship, stating
the arguments why censorship is more challenging in SCION than in today's
Internet. As we have witnessed in the past, censorship has been successful
in today's Internet.

Note that the ISD concept represents a virtual grouping of ASes, an AS can
be part of several ISDs at the same time. When you look at the ISD concept,
it brings transparency and scalability rather than facilitate censorship. A
recent paper shows that (partially thanks to ISDs) scalability of SCION
inter-domain routing is much improved compared to BGP or BGPsec, with about
200 times lower overhead than BGP and 1000 times lower overhead than BGPsec
on a per-path basis:
https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/2021_conext_deployment.pdf

> What will you do about space?  The moon?  (That one's coming sooner that
folks might expect:
https://www.nokia.com/networks/insights/network-on-the-moon)

As for network deployments on the Moon, SCION can bring advantages there as
well, for instance a "moon ISD" will make it easy to ensure that
moon-to-moon packets don't inadvertently take a detour via a terrestrial
router. A related result that may be of interest to the operator community
is our analysis of using path-aware networking for integrating LEO
satellite networks into the Internet:
https://netsec.ethz.ch/publications/papers/ccr-ibis-2020.pdf

> Will each ISD (ISD = Isolation Domain) have it's own DNS?

The SCION DNS story has evolved much since the first book, to only use a
single global name space in the current design (which is written up in the
new SCION book that will go to the printer next week, ping me if you'd like
to see a pre-print).

All the best
  Adrian

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 2:00 AM scott <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:

>
>
> Hello,
>
> "are described in further detail in the survey"
>
> Doing the survey gives legitimacy to something I feel is not correct
>
> -------
>
> "We understand the privacy concern. As for SBAS, the backbone is operated
> in a federated manner among PoP operators."
>
> I asked about the ISDs and put a FAQ you have as an example.  I didn't ask
> about the SBAS.  It seems to me that the ingress/egress of an ISD is the
> place a government surveillance network would reside.  All country internet
> communications go through a chokepoint to get on the SBAS, so it's easier
> to surveil the population.  Especially if you envision the ISD to have its
> own DNS.
>
> scott
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/22/2022 5:22 PM, Yixin Sun wrote:
>
> Hi Scott,
>
> Thank you for your comment! We understand the privacy concern. As for
> SBAS, the backbone is operated in a federated manner among PoP operators.
> In our current deployment, the PoP operators are located across three
> continents. On the other hand, due to the federated structure of the SBAS
> PoP operators, a governance structure is needed to coordinate global
> operation. We have outlined four potential governance models, i.e., ICANN
> and Regional Internet Registries, a multi-stakeholder organization, a
> federation of network providers, or a decentralized governance model. The
> four models are described in further detail in the survey, and we would
> love to hear your opinions about them.
>
> Best,
> Yixin
>
> On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 8:24 PM scott <surfer at mauigateway.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 1/21/2022 12:07 PM, Yixin Sun wrote:
>>
>>
>> We appreciate that your time is very precious, but we wanted to ask you
>> for your help in answering a brief survey about a new secure routing system
>> we have developed in a research collaboration between ETH, Princeton
>> University, and University of Virginia. We'd like to thank those of you who
>> have already helped us fill out the survey and provided insightful
>> feedback. Your input is critical for helping inform our further work on
>> this project.
>>
>> Here is the link to our survey, which takes about 10 minutes to complete,
>> including watching a brief 3-minute introductory video:
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc4VCkqd7i88y0CbJ31B7tVXyxBlhEy_zsYZByx6tsKAE7ROg/viewform?usp=pp_url&entry.549791324=NANOG+mailing+list
>>
>> Our architecture, called Secure Backbone AS (SBAS), allows clients to
>> benefit from emerging secure routing deployments like SCION by tunneling
>> into a secure infrastructure. SBAS provides substantial routing security
>> improvements when retrofitted to the current Internet. It also provides
>> benefits even to non-participating networks and endpoints when
>> communicating with an SBAS-protected entity.
>>
>> We currently have a functional prototype of this network using SCIONLab
>> (for the secure backbone) and the PEERING testbed (to make outbound BGP
>> announcements). Our ultimate aim is to develop and deploy SBAS beyond an
>> experimental scope, and the input of network operators that would actually
>> have to run these PoPs would greatly benefit this project and help make
>> secure routing a reality.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> This all looks like a network made for surveilling the planet's citizens
>> more easily.  Even in the FAQs!
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> "Do you use countries as ISDs? Doesn't that create opportunities for
>> government intervention and censorship?
>>
>> We're currently looking into the best way to partition the Internet into
>> ISDs, so using countries as ISDs is only one possible option. Countries
>> have the advantage of providing a uniform legal environment, allowing
>> misbehavior in an ISD to be handled according to the legal framework of
>> that ISD."
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I guess each country's government will define 'misbehavior' and will have
>> a more easy way to find the misbehaving entity?  Will each ISD (ISD =
>> Isolation Domain) have it's own DNS?  What will you do about space?  The
>> moon?  (That one's coming sooner that folks might expect:
>> https://www.nokia.com/networks/insights/network-on-the-moon)  Just say
>> no to internet partitioning.
>>
>>
>> scott
>>
>>
>>
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