Security and resilience of the European communications networks © European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), 2013 http://enisa.europa.eu

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Resilience of the Interdomain
Routing System
Security and resilience of the European
communications networks

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Agenda
• About ENISA
• Security and resilience of the European
communications networks
• Previous ENISA work
• 2013 Mapping the European Internet
infrastructure

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About ENISA
The European Union Agency for Network and Information
Security – ENISA gives advice on information security
issues to
• Citizens
• Business
• National authorities
• EU institutions

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About ENISA
– acts as a forum for sharing good Network and
Information Security practices
– facilitates information exchange and collaboration
Electronic
Comms
Reference
Group
Cloud
Security
and
Resilience
Experts
Group

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About ENISA
The European Union Agency for Network and Information
Security focuses on
• Prevention
• Preparedness

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Security and resilience of the European
communications networks

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Resilience
…provide and maintain an acceptable level of
service in face of faults (unintentional, intentional,
or naturally caused) affecting their normal
operation….
• Failure recovery at the micro level
• Mid‐size incident
• Disaster recovery at the strategic level

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Resilience
The ability of the system to cope
with small local events such as
machine failures and
reconfigure itself essentially
automatically and over a time
scale of seconds to minutes.
The ability of a system to cope
with and recover from a major
event, such as a large natural
disaster or a capable attack, on
a time scale of hours to days or
even longer.
medium to high impact
medium to low probability
cross boundaries repercussions
possibly cascading impact
low medium high

9. www.enisa.europa.eu 9Cc-by-3.0|Árni Friðriksson

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Assessing resilience of the European
communications networks
• Understand
interdependencies
• Cascading effects on
particular region,
country or set of
critical services
• Inter-networks
consequences

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Potential adverse events
• Regional failure of other critical infrastructure on
which the Internet depends
• Cable cut
• Natural disaster
• Coordinated attack
• Design faults

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Current issues
• the lack of good information about the state and
behavior of the system
• the scale and complexity of the system
• the dynamic nature of the system

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Previous ENISA work

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Previous ENISA Work
• 2010 study “Resilience of the
Internet Interconnection
Ecosystem” (aka “Inter-X
Report”)
• Large collection of resilience
aspects of interconnections on all
layers
• Also contains collection of well-
known incidents
• Chris Hall, Richard Clayton and
Ross Anderson
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/Resilience-and-CIIP/critical-infrastructure-and-services/inter-x/interx

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Previous ENISA Work
• 2011 report “Good Practices in
Resilient Internet Interconnection“
• 15 good practices and 11
recommendations for enhancing
resilience of internet
interconnections
• Christian Doerr and Fernando
Kuipers from TU Delft
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/Resilience-and-CIIP/critical-infrastructure-and-services/inter-x/resilience-of-interconnections/report

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2013 Mapping the European Internet
infrastructure

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Starting point
• Develop techniques to accurately measure the
structure of the Internet
• Investigate the structural properties of the
Internet in a changing provider ecosystem

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The Internet:
in each European country, as a whole
• Dependencies on physical infrastructure
• Cross‐system dependencies
• Inter-domain issues
• Possible point of failures not covered by intra-
domain risk assessment
• National and European-scale complete picture

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Incidents as source of info
• It is straightforward to divert traffic away from its proper
destination by announcing invalid routes -> youtube 2008,
china 2010, Spamhaus & banking IP Hijack 2013…
• Latent bugs in BGP implementations can disrupt the
system -> Cisco & RIPE unexpected attribute 2010,
Juniper 2011…
• In some parts of the world a small number of cable
systems are critical -> Egypt 2013
• The system is critically dependent on electrical power ->
Hurricane Sandy 2012
• The ecosystem can work well in a crisis -> 9/11, japan
earthquake 2011

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Mapping the ecosystem?
• the physical infrastructure - commercially
confidential, sometimes overlap with CNI
• the peering and transit connections -
commercially confidential
• the distribution of traffic flows - commercially
sensitive
• commercial and operational arrangements -
commercially sensitive

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Topologies?
• BGP‐derived AS maps get a reasonable view of the major
transit providers, but miss a large number of peering
relationships between non‐Tier 1 Ases
• Router‐Level Topologies ?
• PoP‐Level Topologies ?
• Budget -> very low

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Develop a methodology:
• Using publicly available information
• Take the big picture of all networks in each
country
• See if it is possible to notice point of failures or
interesting relationships between Ases
Mapping the European Internet infrastructure
Technical component

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Mapping the Internet infrastructure:
organizational component
• What is already shared about
– Physical infrastructure
– Routing infrastructure
• If there are other efforts to map the entire
system
• How do you interact in case of large scale
failures and if there are routines/best practises

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Why ENISA @peering_forum?
• Understanding your point of view concerning
security and resilience of interconnected
networks in europe
• Collect your feedback on ENISA efforts

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Thank you
Rossella Mattioli
rossella.mattioli@enisa.europa.eu
Read more about ENISA work on resilience
https://www.enisa.europa.eu/activities/Resilience-and-
CIIP/critical-infrastructure-and-services/inter-x
Join the ENISA Electronic Comms Reference Group
https://resilience.enisa.europa.eu/ecrg