The original design of Internet and its protocols
presupposes existence of mutual trust and this at times also cause
troubles. In the initial age of Internet, there were very few
Internet
protocol addresses and they use to communicate with each other
directly. There was little reason for abuse or distrust among these
IP addresses and their owners. There were also no fears of
impersonation and IP
spoofing as well.
However, as the Internet and these protocols grew,
they became more unstable and untrustworthy. Now if we send something
in plain text, chances are great that such plain text information
maybe intercepted and misused. Nevertheless, networks and systems
still need to trust each other to make the Internet function in a
speedier manner. If one system or service provider falters, the
services of other may be hampered.
In one such incidence, users around the world were
not able to access Google’s service for a short period of time due
to a technical glitch. Users were cut off due to the routing
leak from Indian broadband Internet provider Hathway. The leak is
similar to a 2012 incident caused by an Indonesian ISP, which took
Google offline for 30 minutes worldwide.
Routing leaks occur when a network provider
broadcasts all or part of its internal routing table to one or more
peered networks via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) causing network
traffic to be routed incorrectly. In the present case Hathway’s
boundary router incorrectly announced routing data for over 300
network prefixes belonging to Google to the Internet backbone via its
provider Bharti Airtel. Bharti in turn announced these routes to the
rest of the world and a number of international ISPs accepted these
routes.
Now why would Google rely upon Hathway for its
services? This is because Hathway peers with Google to provide better
speed to Google’s cloud, directing traffic to the closest Google
data centers. That peering is a private network connection. As a
result, when the routing table was accidentally broadcast to the
world instead of just to Hathway’s customers, much of the world was
trying to access Google via Mumbai, through Hathway, instead of over
the public Internet.
By design users cannot access Google services with
incorrect route information till it is rectified or routed correctly.
Source: Global
Techno Legal News And Views.
