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posted by cmn32480 on Monday February 11 2019, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the in-soviet-russia dept.

Russia plans to 'unplug' from internet

Russia is planning to briefly disconnect from the internet as part of planning for a future cyber-war. The test will mean data passing between Russian citizens and organisations stays inside the nation rather than being routed internationally.

A law mandating technical changes needed to operate independently was introduced to Russia's parliament last year.

The test is due to happen before 1 April but no exact date has been set.

The draft law, called the Digital Economy National Program, requires Russia's ISPs to ensure that it can operate in the event of foreign powers acting to isolate the country online.

[...] The test is also expected to involve ISPs demonstrating that they can direct data to government-controlled routing points. These will filter traffic so that data sent between Russians reaches its destination, but any destined for foreign computers is discarded.


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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday February 11 2019, @10:23PM (2 children)

    by zocalo (302) on Monday February 11 2019, @10:23PM (#799780)
    BGP is still pretty fragile, despite a lot of recent efforts to shore up security and authenticate/validate IP route information and updates. It's not that long ago that we were discussion how quite large amounts of traffic got "accidentally" re-routed from the US via Russia or China and back again, although other BGP mishaps that didn't involve such media-clickbait destination have sent traffic to all sorts of other places as well. Only a few days ago, someone in the UK was jailed for launching a DDoS attack that took basically took Liberia off-line - it's definitely doable, at least on a small scale.

    Anything's possible but, hypothetical Internet kill switches aside, I think you're going to need to come up with some thing pretty special, like a 0-day in the BGP protocol or against one of the major backbone hardware vendors, to knock one of the more connected nations off-line, if only because of the level of redundancy between Tier 1 / Tier 2 providers and international interconnects those countries tend to have. You might, through concerted effort and maybe a multi-pronged attack, be able to destablise things enough to achieve an effective equivalent though.
    --
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by black6host on Monday February 11 2019, @10:55PM (1 child)

    by black6host (3827) on Monday February 11 2019, @10:55PM (#799805) Journal

    I agree that it would take something special. Really, if you think about it, the Russians can take what they learn, shore up things they consider critical, and hopefully learn more to be able to better protect themselves in the future. It will leave them in a better position than when they started, to be sure. There is no magic bullet, particularly because it's a moving target. Taking the threat seriously, even if it can't be fully realized, is not bad policy.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:44AM

      by zocalo (302) on Tuesday February 12 2019, @08:44AM (#799988)
      I suspect the global backbone carriers will learn something too. This exercise would mean a very large number of routes (ASs, really) dropping off the BGP routing table for the duration, then coming back over a fairly short (presumably) timeframe. That's going to put a fair bit of stress on backbone routers that respond quickly enough to update on the outages as they recalculate their routing tables, and again when the recovery starts. The Internet is meant to route around damage, but this isn't so much a flesh wound as lopping a limb off so I suspect there's a pretty good chance of routing instabilities elsewhere as well, which should be enlightening for the carriers concerned.
      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!