Cloud Providers, CDNs, Team Up to Battle Internet Routing Attacks

By Anthony Berrios

Blog Post #16

The battle against routing attacks has come to the forefront recently as huge names join sides to fight a common internet enemy. Massive tech companies like Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix are all banding together to stop route hijacking, route leaks and IP address-spoofing attacks targeting internet users.

The program that has joined them all together that was recently introduced is the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) globally initiative. MANRS over the past six years has worked to build up a team of 300 network operators, internet exchange points (IXPs) and other companies to provide “crucial fixes to reduce the most common threats.” Each company is asked to take specific steps to improve the resilience and security of the routing infrastructure. The steps that each company is asked to take within their corporation to provide better security for their customers and in turn, the world are as follows;

• Prevent propagation of incorrect routing information, which can be done by defining a clear network routing policy
• Prevent traffic of illegitimate source IP addresses, by implementing anti-spoofing controls to prevent packets with illegitimate source IP address from leaving the network
• Facilitate global operational communication and coordination, by maintaining globally accessible up-to-date contact information in PeeringDB (a freely available web-based database of networks that are interested in peering) and relevant databases
• Facilitate validation of routing information on a global scale, by publicly documenting prefixes that are intended to be advertised to external parties
• Encouraging adoption “good practices on routing security” encouraged by MANRS

(bullet points provided by MANRS & article)

The MANRS overall seems like a solid program that is doing a great job thus far putting customer first in an attempt to make the internet a safer place. As of right now, I don’t believe that it is possible to make the internet 100% safe for all users. However, this new program is a step in the right directions that will now force companies to demand better internet safety practices from their customers.