An accident
investigation board
for the internet
would be a modest
and minimally
intrusive step,
though not without
its own challenges.

tween monitoring performance and monitoring content—lines that different jurisdictions might take quite different views on.

All day, every day, the Internet copes with circuit and equipment failures, and almost nobody notices. Occasionally an event—a route leak, the cutting of critical undersea cables, the discovery of a software problem— has a more significant impact, but the Internet just keeps rolling along. Many in the industry will argue this is evidence for the inherent reliability of the Internet, and, if improvement is required, it is best left to the industry. Any outside interference is generally deemed likely to be clueless and destructive.

On the other hand, every incident
is a small experiment in how well the
system responds. But it is nobody’s
job to investigate, assess the impact,
and find the lessons to be learned.
So, nobody does it, or at least nobody
does it thoroughly or authoritatively.
In some cases, those closest to an in-
cident do not care to publish the ex-
act causes or the entire history. This
can be for commercial reasons, or
for security reasons, but often simply
because they have better things to do
with their time. Perhaps we can learn
from the airline industry. Air travel
has become ever safer, not by try-
ing to gain perfect knowledge of all
possible combinations of weather,
equipment failure, human error, and
so forth, but by learning the lessons
of every incident. This common good
is funded communally—nobody ex-
pects the industry to do this by itself.
Further, air accident investigators
have found ways to deal with the com-
mercial and other issues, and to oper-
ate in a global industry.

Conclusion

We do not know whether a more secure Border Gateway Protocol would materially improve the reliability of the Internet, let alone whether the improvement would be cost justified. We do not know whether it would be more effective to improve the operational layer, so that it would cope better with the known vulnerabilities, and would be better prepared to deal with as-yet unknown ones. Assuming we can work out how best to improve things, we do not know how to construct a system of incentives to implement those improvements. And the insecurity of BGP is not the only threat to the Internet’s reliability.

If we are to improve the security and reliability of the Internet, we really need better data on which to base policy and engineering decisions…and that is a common good to which government could usefully contribute.

 

References

1. Hall, C., Clayton, r., anderson, r. and ouzounis, e.

Inter-X: Resilience of the Internet Interconnection Ecosystem. P. trimintzios, ed. enIsa report; http:// www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/resilience-and-CIIP/ networks-and-services-resilience/inter-x/interx/ report/interx-report/.

2. Partridge, C. et al. The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11. the national academies Press, Washington, d. C., 2002.

 

Chris hall ( [e-mail]) is a senior engineer and manager with Highwayman associates in leatherhead, u.k., and the founding executive director of the Communications Innovation Institute (now called the Communications research network) at the Cambridge university Computer laboratory. recently, he has been working on the quagga open-source bGP daemon (sponsored by euro-IX), and co-wrote the report1 from which this column is derived.

Copyright held by author.

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