Posted on 03/30/2019 5:51:37 AM PDT by vannrox
Russia wants to copy China. Reliance on American servers, and American technology is a serious threat to the privacy of Russian citizens.
Russia wants to cut itself off from the global internet. Here’s what that really means. The plan is going to be tricky to pull off, both technically and politically, but the Kremlin has set its sights on self-sufficiency.
by Charlotte Jee March 21, 2019
In the next two weeks, Russia is planning to attempt something no other country has tried before. It’s going to test whether it can disconnect from the rest of the world electronically while keeping the internet running for its citizens. This means it will have to reroute all its data internally, rather than relying on servers abroad. Recommended for You
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The test is key to a proposed “sovereign internet” law currently working its way through Russia’s government. It looks likely to be eventually voted through and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin, though it has stalled in parliament for now.
Pulling an iron curtain down over the internet is a simple idea, but don’t be fooled: it’s a fiendishly difficult technical challenge to get right. It is also going to be very expensive. The project’s initial cost has been set at $38 million by Russia’s financial watchdog, but it’s likely to require far more funding than that. One of the authors of the plan has said it’ll be more like $304 million, Bloomberg reports, but even that figure, industry experts say, won’t be enough to get the system up and running, let alone maintain it.
Not only that, but it has already proved deeply unpopular with the general public. An estimated 15,000 people took to the streets in Moscow earlier this month to protest the law, one of the biggest demonstrations in years.
Operation disconnect
So how will Russia actually disconnect itself from the global internet? “It is unclear what the ‘disconnect test’ might entail,” says Andrew Sullivan, president and CEO of the Internet Society. All we know is that if it passes, the new law will require the nation’s internet service providers (ISPs) to use only exchange points inside the country that are approved by Russia’s telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor. Sign up for The Download Your daily dose of what's up in emerging technology Stay updated on MIT Technology Review initiatives and events?
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These exchange points are where internet service providers connect with each other. It’s where their cabling meets at physical locations to exchange traffic. These locations are overseen by organizations known as internet exchange providers (IXPs). Russia’s largest IXP is in Moscow, connecting cities in Russia’s east but also Riga in neighboring Latvia.
MSK-IX, as this exchange point is known, is one of the world’s largest. It connects over 500 different ISPs and handles over 140 gigabits of throughput during peak hours on weekdays. There are six other internet exchange points in Russia, spanning most of its 11 time zones. Many ISPs also use exchanges that are physically located in neighboring countries or that are owned by foreign companies. These would now be off limits. Once this stage is completed, it would provide Russia with a literal, physical “on/off switch” to decide whether its internet is shielded from the outside world or kept open.
What’s in a name?
As well as rerouting its ISPs, Russia will also have to unplug from the global domain name system (DNS) so traffic cannot be rerouted through any exchange points that are not inside Russia.
The DNS is basically a phone book for the internet: when you type, for example, “google.com” into your browser, your computer uses the DNS to translate this domain name into an IP address, which identifies the correct server on the internet to send the request. If one server won’t respond to a request, another will step in. Traffic behaves rather like water—it will seek any gap it can to flow through.
“The creators of the DNS wanted to create a system able to work even when bits of it stopped working, regardless of whether the decision to break parts of it was deliberate or accidental,” says Brad Karp, a computer scientist at University College London. This in-built resilience in the underlying structure of the internet will make Russia’s plan even harder to carry out.
The actual mechanics of the DNS are operated by a wide variety of organizations, but a majority of the “root servers,” which are its foundational layer, are run by groups in the US. Russia sees this as a strategic weakness and wants to create its own alternative, setting up an entire new network of its own root servers.
“An alternate DNS can be used to create an alternate reality for the majority of Russian internet users,” says Ameet Naik, an expert on internet monitoring for the software company ThousandEyes. “Whoever controls this directory controls the internet.” Thus, if Russia can create its own DNS, it will have at least a semblance of control over the internet within its borders.
This won’t be easy, says Sullivan. It will involve configuring tens of thousands of systems, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to identify all the different access points citizens use to get online (their laptops, smartphones, iPads, and so on). Some of them will be using servers abroad, such as Google’s Public DNS, which Russia simply won’t be able to replicate—so the connection will fail when a Russian user tries to access them.
If Russia can successfully set up its own DNS infrastructure across the country and compel its ISPs to use it, then Russian users are likely not to notice, unless they try to access a website that’s censored. For example, a user trying to connect to facebook.com could be redirected to vk.com, which is a Russian social-media service with an uncanny resemblance to Facebook.
This coming test—no official date has been given— will show us whether the necessary preparation has been done. For the West, it’s important not to underestimate the Russian state’s will, or ability, to make sure it happens.
Resilience and control
The purpose, the Kremlin says, is to make Russia’s internet independent and easier to defend against attacks from abroad. To begin with, it could help Russia resist existing sanctions from the US and the EU, and any potential future measures. It also makes sense to make the internet inside your country accessible in the event it gets physically severed from the rest of the world. For example, in 2008 there were three separate instances of major damage to the internet’s physical cabling under the sea (blamed on ships’ anchors), which cut off access for users in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. If the affected countries had been able to reroute traffic, this disruption might have been avoided.
Many observers see the move as part of Russia’s long tradition of trying to control the flow of information between citizens. Russia has already passed legislation requiring search engines to delete some results, and in 2014 it obliged social networks to store Russian users’ data on servers inside the country. It has also banned encrypted messaging apps like Telegram. Just this week, Russia’s government signed into law two new vaguely worded bills that make it a crime to “disrespect the state” or spread “fake news” online. The new plan to reroute Russian traffic is an “escalation,” says Sergey Sanovich, a Russian researcher at Stanford who specializes in online censorship. “I’d say it’s a dangerous escalation,” he adds. Photo of demonstrators shouting and hold signs during the Free Internet rally ASSOCIATED PRESS
If so, it’s an escalation that has been a long time coming. The conversation between ISPs and the security services has been going on for more than two decades, according to Keir Giles, an expert on Russian security who works for the think tank Chatham House. Security officials in Russia have always seen the internet as more of a threat than an opportunity.
“Russia wants to be able to do this while insulating itself from the consequences, by preemptively cutting itself off from global infrastructure,” Giles says.
If Russia is seeking inspiration, it need just look east. China has been terrifically successful in shaping the online experience for its citizens to its advantage. However, China decided to exert a high degree of control over the development of the internet while it was at a nascent stage. Russia was preoccupied at that time with the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it is quite late to the party. China embedded the homegrown ISP and DNS infrastructure that Russia hopes to construct way back in the early 2000s. Trying to impose this architecture retrospectively is an awful lot harder. “China took control very early on, and decided that all traffic in and out must be controlled and regulated,” says Naik.
The fallout
In contrast, Russian businesses and citizens are firmly enmeshed in the global internet and use a lot more foreign services, such as Microsoft cloud tools, than Chinese people do. It’s not yet clear what impact the disconnection will have on these, but it’s possible that if the plug is pulled on external traffic routes, Russian citizens may lose access to them. While many cloud services can “mirror” their content in different regions, none of the major cloud services (Microsoft, Google or Amazon Web Services) have data centers based in Russia. Replicating these services within Russia’s borders is not trivial and would require significant investment and time, says Naik. The coming test might be intended to address this issue, according to Sullivan.
Another potential problem is that many Russian ISPs carry traffic on behalf of other companies or ISPs, with reciprocal arrangements that they carry traffic for Russian ISPs too. If it’s done incorrectly, Russia’s plan means a “whole bunch of the traffic going in and out of Russia will just fall into a black hole,” says Naik.
If the experiment goes wrong and large parts of the internet go down in Russia, it could cost the nation’s economy dearly (disconnecting from the internet has been incredibly costly for countries that have experienced it, deliberately or otherwise). That doesn’t mean the Kremlin won’t go ahead with it anyway, Giles believes.
If it happens, don't expect Russians to hand over their internet rights freely: as in China, it’s likely that determined, tech-savvy citizens will be able to exploit any weaknesses in the system and circumvent it. For example, during protests in Turkey, people shared ways to access the global DNS directly, thus thwarting their government’s block on social-media websites.
One recent event that may have given Russia more impetus to push forward with the plan is the hacking by the US Cyber Command of the Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll factory” that allegedly used social media to sow division in the US during the 2016 election.
“The threat is real. The number of people who access antigovernment internet content is growing,” says Kirill Gusov, a journalist and political expert in Moscow. The government controls the media and television, but the internet remains beyond its grasp. “I’d not be surprised if the FSB [the successor to the KGB] approached Putin and reported on this attack, which coincided with their desire to suppress internet freedom because they are losing control over society,” he says.
Though it’s still not clear when if ever the law will become a reality, the Russian government isn’t known for being flexible or responsive to public pressure. It’s far more likely to be delayed than dead.
Kerry:
“Well, folks, ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year.
“It makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest,and that is complicated by a rise of sectarianism and religious extremism that is prepared to employ violent means to impose on other people a way of thinking and a way of living that is completely contrary to everything the United States of America has ever stood for. So we need to keep in mind what our goals are and how complicated this world is that we’re operating in.”
But not our way.
The “Global Internet” was always a short-lived pipe dream.
The “National Network” is the future.
Take that to the bank. It cannot be any other way.
Anyone anywhere including Russia can get a routable address for $5 a month and use it to connect to any server anywhere. You can even pay more than that for a VPN service which the Russians will notice and cut off when they want to. Censoring by name (controlling DNS) is dumb because DNS is just a convenience. Censoring by address is better but very difficult and Russia will fail.
PING
I can’t remember which US Rep/Senator said ‘ the Internet has made it so much harder to govern, people have too much information.’
John F. Kerry
.
Sure, that’s why we all use AOL now.
“Sure, that’s why we all use AOL now.”
I’ve been building networks for over 30 years, since before Windows, before browsers and before civilian use of IP.
I have joined the networks of multi-billion dollar tech companies, aerospace companies and natural resource companies. To boot, my origin was military communications.
From peering across the internet at 40gbs to AOL dial-up I’ve done pretty much everything in this discipline.
You’d do well to pay attention to somebody who knows what they are talking about. Derision is not an effective learning tool.
*** Can’t say I’m surprised. Relying on US software, servers, and hardwares means their entire electronic infrastructure is wide open to the NSA. ***
And other Countries are joining Russia’s alternative to SWIFT global banking system.
I love how Russia is insulating itself from Western Sanctions, and hacking, then watching the spin by the US.
The thing that really surprises me is how they placed the sanctions on Russia, kicked them out of SWIFT and had Visa and Mastercard pull out of their country, and are now floored that Russia created their own alternatives and now are blocking Visa and Mastercard from returning.
What did they honestly expect would happen?
That’s probably a link to another story that the poster copied together with the content off the website.
On the bright side Russian hackers will get cut off from the US financial system.
“What’s the point of having computerized banking, for example, if you cannot communicate with banking systems in the world’s financial centers, such as New York, London, Zurich, Frankfurt, Shanghai and Tokyo???”
Accounts don’t have to be settled right away.
Factors could lend accounts receivable for short terms.
If I buy something online, my bank should hold the money until 14 days after my next statement is due to be delivered to my house to prevent fraud.
Appeal to authority won’t get very far with me. My first network was a mixture of appletalk, SNA and TCP/IP with gateways in between them. I’ve written protocols from scratch. I wrote SSL from scratch (starting with my own bignum library) If you believe walled garden networks will 1) be useful and 2) keep people in, then I’ll sell you a couple dams and a bridge in China.
They will not keep people in.
They will keep other people out.
And they will be enormously useful, as they are today.
And every advanced nation on the planet is making plans for it. Whether they implement is a separate question.
The US sees an open, free global internet as in its’ best interest. Some countries in other parts of the world want to be part of that. Many, many others do not.
An open, global internet is a recipe for national disaster...even for the US. And even though current national policy says it’s a good thing.
As soon as an advanced state actor decides to shut it down, it’s down. And the impact of that will change everything.
The National Security vulnerability is incalculable.
*** What did they honestly expect would happen? ***
Law of unintended consequences, ignoring the bigger, long-term possibilities for short term gain, stupidity?
I am surprised how the US plays the “short” game, where as a country like China takes a more patient long term approach.
I watched Putin’s speech on this the other day. He emphasized without their sovereignty, there is no Russia. Protecting that sovereignty is number one for survival.
I compare that to the US approach which is allowing an open border in which in one day in my state, over 1700 people from who knows where came in with Border Patrol saying they are overwhelmed, and ICE isn’t notified.
We have effectively given up our sovereignty while sending dollars, and assets to overthrow other countries. Meanwhile, in ten days time enough illegal foreigners have come in to replace every man, woman, and child in my town.
Off my little soapbox.
For the most part these days, those are the same thing. The viability of remote exploits has been diminishing for years. Instead China puts the malware in ROM, puts the item in a box, and ships it to an end user. From there the malware goes out to get updates and commands. As you indicate, nothing will prevent any software from doing that here or in Russia.
Of course I have changed the topic a little, from an open internet to an open market for internet connected devices. China is benefitting from that right now. Russia can too but they have to piggy back on Chinese products, by reverse engineering or bribing Chinese engineers, or whatever it takes. Of course any other country can too.
There's one more aspect of keeping people out and that is closing their internet market. For example, disallowing Russians from using cloud services provided by anyone else. That will impede Russian internet progress. There is decent open source software for cloud provisioning but anyone with a good service idea in Russia will want to sell their service on cloud servers around the world, not just using Amazonski web service knockoffs. And if they sell from the Russian cloud they have to let people in or put that cloud in a DMZ.
Could you briefly and as if speaking to a curious child explain the national network?
I know very little computer tech to start with and I can tell you are a giant in this area from today’s posts alone.
I am thinking of trading in my Tandy TRS 80 due to problems with the cassette volume levels making it hard to add stuff (kidding). But not by much.
Also do you agree with this sentiment from a guy who was a few yards away from me when I worked at U of Michigan for decades? Or is he being provincial?
https://www.michigandaily.com/article/would-there-be-internet-without-u
Van Houweling added that the University was uniquely positioned to build a successful and efficient network, as opposed to other universities around the country.
“All the other proposals that were submitted to NSF would have built much less capable networks,” Van Houweling said. “(Other university networks) would have gotten saturated. There wouldn’t have been enough resources to make them work, and the notion of these Internet protocols that we now depend on for everything would have gotten a black eye. It might have been the end of the Internet.”
Atkins said if the University did not step up, the Internet could have ended up as a much more closed environment that was segmented between telecommunications companies.
The demonrats have already taken over much of the internet and cable news. It’s becoming more and more obvious, they were the ones getting cuddly with the Russians.
““The only place in the world the Internet could have been invented was at a university, because we’re the only people who understand that good things happen when nobody is in charge,” he said.”
The good professor is a little full of himself, and is inflating his university’s importance in the whole mess.
DARPA, in the height of the cold war needed a survivable, decentralized network where everbody could talk to everbody. So they awarded dozens of research grants throughout the university system to develop the technology.
And it was this man who decided who got money, and for what:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
The indisputable “Father of the Internet”. Recognized by everyone who knows anything about shit.
And once we had the browser, invented at UI Urbana, the world was changed. (MOSAIC)
MOSAIC was killed by Netscape by ‘95, and subsequently was killed by IE by 2001.
The infrastructure was another element funded by Vint. Cisco Systems was founded by two professors from Stanford who started their R&D on Vint’s dime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Systems
They’re now one of the largest and richest companies in the world. And much of the innovation of the last 15 years has been driven by them.
Then there’s the transport innovators. Dow/Corning. Fujitsu. Cisco. Bell Labs/AT&T.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing#Dense_WDM
And the microprocessor innovators, specifically Intel...but IBM and Bell Labs have a role too. And SUN.
And the UNIX kings gave us DNS.
So, today we have an internet which is still innovating and morphing.
Our current matrix is dozens and dozens of 40 gigabit per second circuits interconnecting at multiple points in the US and around the world.
But a “national network” would have just a few very tightly controlled interfaces/gateways between the US network and other national networks we wish to exchange data with. And we could disconnect in short order to protect national assets.
There’s more, and I’ve simplified the bulk of it.
So WE can't ever cut ourselves off from 'the world' or Nigerian scammers either - even if we wanted to?
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