A group of tech giants – including Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix – are banding together to battle route hijacking, route leaks and IP address-spoofing attacks targeting internet users.
They’re coming together under a program was introduced this week by the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) global initiative. MANRS over the past six years has worked to build up a team of 300 network operators, internet exchange points (IXPs) and other companies to provide “crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats.”
MANRS’ latest program brings in content delivery networks (CDNs), like Akamai and Cloudflare, which are geographically distributed groups of servers that provide quick delivery of internet content worldwide. Also included are cloud providers like Microsoft and AWS, which offer network services, infrastructure or cloud-based applications via the internet or private interconnections. Members in the program are tasked with taking specific steps to improve the resilience and security of the routing infrastructure.
The internet routing process is complex; exchanged traffic for instance runs on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a protocol that joins different networks together to build a “roadmap” of the internet. BGP however does not have built-in validation mechanisms, which can expose businesses to attacks such as route hijacking, route injection attacks, IP address spoofing and more, which allow attackers to snoop in on victim traffic.
“It is only through collective action and a shared sense of responsibility that we can address problems like BGP leaks, hijacks, [distributed denial-of-service] (DDoS) attacks and IP address-spoofing that have real-world consequences for millions of people,” according to MANRS
in a post this week. “We must work together to build a more resilient and secure internet infrastructure.”
