Internet Routing Security Initiative Launches … – Dark Reading

Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) lets network operators and the public view online router incidents worldwide.

An Internet Society-backed effort to thwart malicious Internet traffic and abuse now tracks routing incidents online via a free tool that also shows how much of its agreed-upon set of routing security and resiliency practices that network providers worldwide have adopted to date.

The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative’s new MANRS Observatory turns up the heat on network providers’ compliance to filtering incorrect or malicious routing information; preventing spoofed source IP addresses; validating routing information; and coordinating among other network operators. MANRS, which launched in 2014, includes members such as Comcast, Google, and Microsoft, with more than 200 network operator members and 35 Internet exchange points. The initiative hopes to quell attacks on the Internet’s routing infrastructure.

There were some 12,000 routing outages or attacks worldwide in 2018, the group says. One particularly painful incident last November misrouted Google’s traffic through China after a Nigerian ISP misconfigured a routing protocol filter. The mistake ultimately took down the Net in several regions and raised privacy concerns. 

“Routing security remains a problem,” says Andrei Robachevsky, senior technology program manager at the Internet Society. “Routing is often a target to affect other services” on the Internet, he says.

The MANRS Observatory in part is intended to give members a visual reality-check on where they stand in advancing the security and resiliency of the Internet routing infrastructure, according to Robachevsky. “We need to work at being more transparent and more measurable,” he says. “It [puts] internal pressure on participants so they cannot hide behind state websites” of routing statistics.