Posted on 11/15/2010 6:55:07 PM PST by Christian Engineer Mass
Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic, including that of many U.S. government and military sites, was briefly redirected through computer servers in China in April, according to a congressional commission report due out this week.
It is not clear whether the incident was deliberate, but the capability could enable severe malicious activities including the diversion of data and the interception of supposedly secure encrypted Internet traffic, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission states in a report to Congress.
A draft copy of the report, which is to be released Wednesday but viewed by The Washington Times, reports for the first time that .gov and .mil websites were affected by the 18-minute-long April 8 redirection, including those for the Senate, all four military services, the office of the secretary of defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "and many others," as well as commercial websites including those of Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft and IBM.
In effect, Internet traffic to and from those sites was wrongly told that the best route it could take to its destination was through servers in China.
The redirection, though brief, could have enabled "surveillance of specific users or sites [and] ... could even allow a diversion of data to somewhere that the user did not intend," the report states. The huge volume of traffic redirected could have been intended to cover a targeted attack on a single website or user.
"Perhaps most disconcertingly ... control over diverted data could possibly allow a telecommunications firm to compromise the integrity of supposedly secure encrypted sessions," the report adds.
It remains unclear whether the redirection was intentional, the report says, but it demonstrates that it is possible for malicious actors to seize control of the Internet and
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Read carefully.
It was done with the blessing of our beloved leaders
Gee, April was a VERY long time ago, ....in the meanwhile??
To KNOW why this happened, you would need LOTS of information. Obviously routers routed traffic that way. Why?
Nearly 15 percent ... Internet traffic ... was briefly redirected through computer servers in China in AprilDoes anybody know if China has an over-capacity of fiber to even HANDLE the excess traffic (me thinks not) into and out of the REST of the WORLD? (THIS would also mean that a LOT of routers iin the ROW would have had to have their routing changed ... again, doubtful IMNSHO.)
Note: The term used is 'computer servers', not routers (WHICH are optimized to pass traffic swiftly via implementation in ASICs or FPGAs vs a 'computer' which would have to move 'data' internally via the execution of specific instructions).
I would need to look more into it, but I guess it was something like:
* routers choose routes for traffic based on how congested routes are
* chinese routers claim to have huge amounts of bandwidth free
* routers route traffic through chinese routers
It’s an incredibly open system. Not complicated. Maybe IP needs an update to solve this backdoor. I wonder if IPv6 takes care of it.
“a LOT of routers iin the ROW would have had to have their routing changed”
see #7. The routing is dynamic.
B) Now, address the issue of route capacity, i.e., fiber capacity in/out of China ...
OK: those 18 minutes would have been very slow on the ‘net
Had it gone on longer, people might have started complaining
Took that long to cache the data...?
2 of my favorite texts are Transaction Processing by Gray and Network Flows by those 3 guys (Ahuia et al.)
Know any more recent good ones in that same league?
Start here.
“SHANGHAI, October 12, 2010 – Cisco today held a grand ceremony to mark the 5th anniversary of the Cisco China Research and Development Center (CRDC). Established in 2005, CRDC has become the third largest R&D center for Cisco around the world.”
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/global/asiapac/news/2010/pr_10-12.html
from the White House: crickets
Would the route change because a Chinese router "had more bandwidth available," or only because a router within the current, preferred path suddenly went down or became congested?
How, exactly, could the Chinese influence traffic routing of specific U.S. data?
I’m not sure exactly, but from what I remember of networking class routers need some way of determining which routes are congested and which have excess capacity - they have no way of determining that independently, so they must rely on status information from other routers.
If that status information was spoofed, you could get a lot of traffic to go through your nodes
When are we going to realize that even if this was not an
intentional act by the Chi-Coms, we have enough others that
we KNOW were.
These are probes. The electronic version of us overflying the Soviet Union with the U2.
The Japanese had agents in Hawaii to size up the defenses of Pearl Harbor before that disaster.
This is the same kind of stuff.
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