Youtube Video

Summary published at 9/13/2024

🌐 The White House has acknowledged that our country is under attack and emphasizes the need to secure our borders, specifically the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), a crucial component of the internet.

📉 In 2008, a misconfiguration in Pakistan caused YouTube to go down globally. In 2018, Amazon Route 53 DNS traffic was hijacked, impacting many users. In 2021, Facebook and Instagram experienced significant outages due to similar issues.

🔍 BGP allows networks to announce their existence and the paths available to them, functioning like the post office of the internet. However, it was designed over 25 years ago and lacks essential security checks.

⚠️ The protocol does not verify the authority of networks announcing traffic changes, leading to potential route leaks. For instance, during the Amazon Route 53 attack, users were redirected to a fake website, resulting in credential theft.

🔒 A proposed fix involves using Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to cryptographically sign BGP route announcements, ensuring their legitimacy. Currently, 70% of BGP routes in the EU have published Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), compared to only 39% in the United States.

💡 The internet, despite its flaws, can be repaired by knowledgeable individuals. Resources like Brilliant offer hands-on courses to enhance programming skills and understanding of technology.

Download our Chrome extension for Youtube summaries