Find out if your ISP implements BGP safely

[douglas9]

Cloudflare launched Is BGP safe yet recently that provides Internet users with a test to find out whether their Internet Service Provider (ISP) has implemented a certification system to make BGP safer to use.

All it takes is to open the website and click on the "test your ISP" button to run a quick test that determines whether the ISP has implemented the certification system RPKI.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a core Internet protocol that is used to determine the route that data takes on the Internet. One of the issues associated with the protocol is that the possibility of hijacking exists. A basic example would be that traffic from a user in the United States would go through servers in Asia to access the New York Times website.

While that is usually caused by server misconfigurations, it is sometimes used on purpose to redirect traffic for malicious or privacy-invading purposes, e.g. to record data.

Cloudflare's test checks if the ISP has implemented Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) by announcing a legitimate route and making sure the route is invalid. If the site is loaded, the invalid route was accepted by the ISP which in turn means that the ISP has not implemented RPKI.


https://www.ghacks.net/2020/04/19/find-out-if-your-isp-implements-bgp-safely/

[WhiteTara]

1. Thanks. Nice to know I'm safe!

[BootinUp]

2. FAIL. facepalm

[ret5hd]

3. Your reply certainly helped my understanding...

of the issue.

Anyone else? Did you find this reply enlightening?

[Make7]

4. I assume he was saying his ISP failed the Border Gateway Protocol test.

If not then there definitely needed to be an explanation.

[BootinUp]

5. My isp failed. That was it. Nt

[douglas9]

6. You Can Now Check If Your ISP Uses Basic Security Measures

FOR MORE THAN an hour at the beginning of April, major sites like Google and Facebook sputtered for large swaths of people. The culprit wasn't a hack or a bug. It was problems with the internet data routing standard known as the Border Gateway Protocol, which had allowed significant amounts of web traffic to take an unexpected detour through a Russian telecom. For Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, it was the last straw.

BGP disruptions happen frequently, generally by accident. But BGP can also be hijacked for large-scale spying, data interception, or as a sort of denial of service attack. Just last week, United States Executive Branch agencies moved to block China Telecom from offering services in the US, because of allegedly malicious activity that includes BGP attacks. Companies like Cloudflare sit on the front lines of the BGP blowback. And while the company can't fix the problem directly, it can call out those that are slow to contribute defenses.

On Friday, the company launched Is BGP Safe Yet​, a site that makes it easier for anyone to check whether their internet service provider has added the security protections and filters that can make BGP more stable. Those improvements are most effective with wide adoption from ISPs, content delivery networks like Cloudflare, and other cloud providers. Cloudflare estimates that so far about half of the internet is more protected thanks to heavy hitters like AT&T, the Swedish telecom Telia, and the Japanese telecom NTT adopting BGP improvements. And while Cloudflare says it doesn't seem like the Rostelecom incident was intentional or malicious, Russian telecoms do have a history of suspicious BGP meddling, and similar problems will keep cropping up until the whole industry is on board.

https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-bgp-routing-safe-yet/