Hi fellow NANOGers -
I recently spent some time with peering coordinators at industry events (NANOG,
EPF, AFPIF, UKNOF, etc.) where I asked “How does Internet Peering affect
Internet Security?”
The result of this exercise is a white paper, currently in its draft 4-page
form, entitled “How Internet Peering Improves Security.”
What I need now are a handful of people that are interested in this subject and
willing to let me talk through the draft in order to solicit direct feedback.
If interested, please send email to w...@drpeering.net with subject: "Review
How Internet Peering Improves Security" and I will reach out to schedule some
time.
Thanks in advance -
Bill
PS - Here is the abstract to help you decide if you are interested in helping
me document this for the community, and yes, as usual, I will be happy to share
the resulting white paper with anyone interested.
How
Internet Peering Improves Security
William B. Norton <w...@drpeering.net>
Abstract
Denial-of-Service attacks continue to flood the Internet at increasing scale.
They attack specific targets, while, as a side affect, disrupt any traffic that
traverses the network attack paths. During these attacks, impacted Internet
users may experience intermittent problems, such as video freeze frames,
garbled audio during phone or Skype calls, or error messages indicating that
their Internet cloud service is unavailable.
The ubiquitous and open nature of the Internet is both its value and its
downfall. All one needs for access to cloud storage systems (DropBox, Box.net,
etc.) is an Internet connection. This also means that attackers need only a
few thousand broadband computers, infected with viruses and taken over as
zombies, to exploit this open Internet ecosystem and overwhelm even the most
robust Internet services.
The attacks are not predictable in time, scope, or scale, and the impacts are
far reaching, well beyond the source and destinations of the attacks. For these
reason, the commodity Internet may not suitable for a subset of Internet
applications. For example, some enterprise mission-critical applications
require consistency simply unavailable from today’s Internet Transit services.
There is however a well-known interconnection approach that improves this
situation: an interconnection technique call “Internet Peering.“ This paper
will introduce Internet Peering and discuss how Internet security is improved
simply by using this common interconnection technique.
