Comment by cowlevel
3 days ago
My concern about RPKI is legal pressure on the registries. By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access by tampering with that database.
Without RPKI, it would be easy for many governments to cut off Russia's internet access by launching a BGP attack.
Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).
This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.
> should they choose to exercise it
Until other networks choose to exorcise them and their control with it. If you play unfairly often enough, you get depeered.
If that were to happen, everybody in Russia would just turn RPKI enforcement off, so this would only turn off their internet access for a few hours at most. See the recent .de DNSSEC failures [0] for an example of this.
Also, the registries are already capable of unilaterally transferring Russia's IP space to somebody else, so if they transferred it to AWS (for example) and they immediately started using it, this would have a similar effect, except this couldn't be fixed by toggling a switch, since it would mean that people would need to choose between connecting to either Russia or AWS.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/de-tld-outage-dnssec/
And Russia's peers and the rest of the wider internet? It doesn't matter what rostelekom does if Comcast feels that all routes originating from rostelekom are invalid, and doesn't propagate them. And that's not even a tier 1.
If Comcast's customers (big corporate ones, they don't care about regular people) complain, then Comcast would probably override the RPKI validation too. Well, unless they're somehow legally precluded from doing so, but in that case RPKI hardly matters since they couldn't peer with them even if their routes were valid.
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The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future, but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL, with about a third of the votes going to pro-Russian parties and with the destruction of MH17 basically gone from the public discourse.
> but the actual reason is that the Russian influence found a fertile ground in the NL
Are they stupid and can't think for themselves? The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system. Why would they be influenced by a foreign government? I always find it amusing.
> The Netherlands have strong democratic tradition and great public education system.
Unfortunately, for the same reason that Russian influence found fertile ground in the US (MAGA), France (both le Pen and Melenchon), Germany (AfD and BSW), Italy (Berlusconi, Salvini), Hungary (Orban/Fidesz), Poland (PiS), Slovakia (Fico), the UK (UKIP, Reform, and relating to Brexit, the Tories)...
Unchecked globalization has led to serious economic devastation, and Russian propaganda picked that up and blamed it all on immigrants, and added a bunch of LGBT hate on top because that serves as a decent wedge issue for a group of the population that the anti-immigrant stuff doesn't catch that much. And on top of that, they made the immigration issue so much worse - Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran all have Russia's bloody fingerprints all over them.
And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
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Social media
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> The Netherlands won't do it. Personally I think it shouldn't, as it'd set a sort of precedent that would be easy to abuse in the future
Would you stand by this statement if we did s/Netherlands/United States/g ?
It's not about the governments of today, but those of the future.
Yes.
There is imho very little to gain from such a move, and potentially a lot to lose. Disconnecting a whole society in such a way would make the total government control even easier.
Edit: typo
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Could this be that having to buy Russia oil from US isn't good for the people of Netherlands for example?
The fact that you're mentioning oil and not gas tells me you are not really familiar with the situation.
But no, getting yourself in a situation where you're dependent on cowboy regimes for critical resources is not good for the people.
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RPKI isn't necessary for this hypothetical to happen, and there's a lot easier ways for various governments to put pressure on network providers to do their bidding.
I'm sure there's several ways in which ICANN and RIPE could screw Russia over. I'm also sure (or at least hopeful) they understand this would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
> would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
With the growing threat profiles and potential damage, I wonder the cost calculations being made behind closed doors right now of both governments and companies about that very possibility.
A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
>A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
Is this an American thing? For example the home Depot and velera do it.
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If it’s so simple to do I’m not sure why the west hasn’t already done it vis a vis Russia and China. Spam and scams would drop precipitously instantly.
Dropping traffic by source country is not that hard, if you assume country of ip registration is country of origin, which mostly works although things like multination networks, ip leasing or other reuse, and proxy/vpn can result in misattribution.
However, if you mandated blocking Russia or China at a national level, you would cause some major issues.
a) it would become very hard to communicate with people in China. That would make commerce with China very difficult. Blocking communication with your number 3 trading partner [1] is going to be a massive disruption.
b) Doing the same for Russia would be less disruptive as there's much less trade between the US and Russia, and significantly fewer immigrants to the US from Russia than from China. However, there's still a lot of connection between the US and Russia and that would be disrupted.
Given the success of the internet and the layering of everything else over it, I suspect cutting off internet would likely cut off phone service as well. Even postal mail might be impacted, as there is likely coordination between national agencies via the internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
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Hey, have you seen the latest in streaming boxes that provide access to 500+ channels of content for free? Pay no attention to the minor detail that it will act as a proxy in your homeland doing the bidding of its foreign masters. Available for delivery tomorrow for the low low price of $35 usd.
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So a highly specific problem couched in terms of the legal obligations of the registry. But,you ignore the other dimension of WHY a legal authority might require a registry to act.
Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
The registry system we live in has operated for almost 3 decades now, an inheritance of a prior informal arrangement. It's a mutuality. If you want to change it, get involved in it's policy process.
The internet is supposed to be a decentralized network.
When ISPs have so much control, I don't see it as decentralized.
It is designed for fallbacks or ability to reroute when connections become congested or get cut.
Real world decentralized communication would not require an ISP and could operate by proxy with multi modes of communication. This way you can circumvent Government restrictions.
Sneaker net is decentralized and how North Koreans circumvent their government.
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I don’t think that one country should get to unilaterally decide whether another country gets internet, no.
Why would a country take these actions?
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You do understand that the hypothetical threat actor here is one who openly disregards international law?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/08/03/us-hague-invasion-act-be...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-imposes-sanctions-internati...
>Do you honestly think the world would be better if there was no international law, or legal constraints on ISPs? Do you think BGP operators are somehow supra legal?
Yes. It was the vision of the internet to continue on outside of the whatever political whims some tiny slice of western governments.
It’s just too ripe for abuse.
You can make whatever “whatabout” arguments on DNS, etc but none of those are required to get connectivity (DHT, p2p hosts, tor names, etc).
Any centralization around the narrow middle IP layer of the internet should be treated with extreme skepticism and pushback.
This is what happens when someone wants to regulate the crap outta everything. what a dumb ass take.
Regulate the crap out of invading a peaceful neighboring country ? I’m down for it.
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IP address space and the domain name system are centralized with defined roots, and IANA/RIPE could have removed russia from the internet a long time ago. A primary reason why they have not done this is what happen after the war is over, at which point the west would have Internet with root A, and Russia would have Internet with root B, and recombining A and B would be a very difficult and likely to last longer than transitioning completely from IPv4 to IPv6.
If there is a central and core theme with the Internet and all the organizations that manage the core infrastructure is the effort to avoid splitting the root.
I am afraid there is no winning in either direction, you have to accept the plausible trade offs. Though on high level I do agree that it should not be centralized with one country at least. Then again the whole setup is based on mutual trust.
Swap Russia for any other country and …
But … cutting off Russia wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Russia is one of the only remaining places you can host things banned in the US.
In this admin and it’s banned in the US? So what? Csam? Terrorism? Why would that be a green flag and not a red flag?
The amount of folks that excuse a lot of garbage people in power do these days for the free speech maximalists is insane to me.
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Certificate revocation as an act of war... the 2030s are gonna be wild.
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End, which is set in 2025. It features a cyberattack against a rogue AI, which involves revoking a root CA certificate belonging to Credit Suisse, causing massive collateral damage to the European economy and infrastructure.
Vinge didn't quite get to see his rogue AI prediction become (sort of) reality, right on schedule, but he did at least outlive Credit Suisse.
It's already happening, you cannot access the websites of many sanctioned Russian entities without trusting a Russia-issued root CA. The fragmentation of the Internet is already in motion
There's no reason an independent entity couldn't spin up a new trust anchor, as long as they get RPs to follow it. If a government started meddling with an RIR's RPKI database, that would provide a pretty good set of incentives for an AltDB-but-for-RPKI TA to gain adoption. Even in the absence of meddling, this would be useful for legacy IPv4 holders, who currently don't have a way to participate in RPKI.
As a legacy IPv4 holder for over 30 years, I realize I'm going to be forced to pay ARIN at some point. It's been a good run though.
Just for RPKI access, or for other reasons too?
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Well if that happens, operators will be forced to make a choice - comply with it, or stop using rpki.
Having a system like this is like signing an agreement. Its only worth anything so long as people decide to respect it. If operators overplay their hand, people might stop respecting it.
Why would western operators turn off rpki validation of this happened?
They would make a choice. They might not turn it off, just like they might blick russia even without rpki.
Or they could order Western telecoms to depeer with Russian ones. That would be even more effective.
I get your broader point, but making it potentially easier to cut Russia specifically off from the Internet might not be the worst thing in the world.
> By centralising all of Russia's allowed routes on a database server in the Netherlands and automatically enforcing it, it's trivial for the Dutch government to cut off Russia's internet access
Yes, and? This would be a boon for the rest of the world.
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