Category Archives: RIPE

Transparency in Rome

Here’s my presentation, Transparency as Incentive for Internet Security: Organizational Layers for Reputation, from RIPE 61 in Rome. This presentation summarizes the two previous RIPE Labs papers about proposed new organizational layers and outbound spam ranking experiments.

RIPE-NCC is the oldest of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), and RIPE is the deliberately unorganized association of interested parties that meets twice a year and holds discussions online in between. It’s a mix of operations, research, and socializing. Topics range from obscure details of deploying IPv6 to organizational proposals such as what I was talking about. 430 people attended the meeting in Rome, which was quite a few more than the dozen or two of the first RIPE meeting I went to many years ago.

Interesting questions were asked. I may blog some of them.

-jsq

Daniel Karrenberg and RIPE Atlas

Daniel Karrenberg shows an animation related to RIPE Atlas, RIPE’s new active measurement project using USB-powered dongles scattered around the Internet.

Video by jsq at RIPE 61 in Rome, Italy, 15 Nov 2010. His slides, the RIPE Atlas home page, and the conference will put up video of all the talks within about a day.

-jsq

PS: My talk is 11AM Rome time tomorrow, Tuesday 16 Nov.

Outbound Spam Ranking Experiments

Should Uganda Telecom be counted as a Belgian ISP for outbound spam rankings?

Which matters most: history, topology, business headquarters location, or some other criterion?

These are some questions that come up in designing experiments in rolling out a reputation system for outbound spam. More on this in the RIPE Labs article (8 Nov 2010), Internet Reputation Experiments for Better Security.

Such experiments can draw on fifty years of social science research and literature, first crystalized as Social Comparison Theory by Leon Festinger in 1954, that indicate that making personal reputation transparent changes personal behavior. More recent research indicates that the same applies to organizations. Using anti-spam blocklist data, it is possible to make E-Mail Service Provider (ESP) behavior (banks, stores, universities, etc., not just ISPs) in preventing or stopping outbound spam transparent, and this paper is about experiments to see how the resulting reputation actually changes ESP behavior.

-jsq

Organizing the Cloud Against Spam

In RIPE Labs, here’s a paper on Internet Cloud Layers for Economic Incentives for Internet Security by the IIAR Project (I’m the lead author). Anti-spam blocklists and law enforcement are some Internet organizational layers attempting to deal with the plague of spam, so far reaching a standoff where most users don’t see most spam, yet service providers spend large amounts of computing and people resources blocking it.
The root of the ecrime problem is not technology: it is money.
Continue reading →

Route Hijacking: Identity Theft of Internet Infrastructure

Peter Svensson gives an old and quite serious problem some mainstream press in this AP story from 8 May 2010:
On April 25, 1997, millions of people in North America lost access to all of the Internet for about an hour. The hijacking was caused by an employee misprogramming a router, a computer that directs data traffic, at a small Internet service provider.

A similar incident happened elsewhere the next year, and the one after that. Routing errors also blocked Internet access in different parts of the world, often for millions of people, in 2001, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009. Last month a Chinese Internet service provider halted access from around the world to a vast number of sites, including Dell.com and CNN.com, for about 20 minutes.

In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent access to YouTube from the country and intentionally “black-holed” requests for YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the international carrier upstream from it that “I’m the best route to YouTube, so send all YouTube traffic to me.” The upstream carrier accepted the routing message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours.

In 2004, the flaw was put to malicious use when someone got a computer in Malaysia to tell Internet service providers that it was part of Yahoo Inc. A flood of spam was sent out, appearing to come from Yahoo.

The Pakistani incident is illustrated in the accompanying story and video by RIPE.

This problem has been known for a long time. Why hasn’t it been fixed? Continue reading →