According to a study by Mutually Agreed Norms For Routing Stability (MANRS), network owners in Australia and New Zealand must do more to protect their routing infrastructure.
Terry Sweetser (writing in the MANRS) said that the state of the routing infrastructure in these two countries puts citizens, businesses, and governments at risk from “data loss, theft or interruption of critical services”.
The Australian government especially is concerned with critical infrastructure given the new focus on the trio of telecommunications, cloud services, and electricity.
MANRS study, ” State of RPKI in Australia & New Zealand“ found that both countries have made significant progress in routing security, but there are still serious risks to citizens, businesses, and government.
The research for this report involved several tests of routing through Australia and New Zealand to select websites. These sites also included educational institutions and government services.
The study looked into whether websites belonging to both public and private institutions in the two countries rejected connections from clearly invalid sources of traffic.
It also examined if networks where these websites are hosted provide necessary measures to avoid route hijacks. The results were a cause for concern.
The first test was focused on network implementation of route origin validation , this involved making connection attempts using valid or invalid route origin authorisations.
Research showed that Australia’s websites with.com.au domains were more than 35 percent open to traffic from untrued sources. This was compared with Australia’s websites and.co.nz domains which only had 33%.
“The implication of accepting traffic from invalid origins strongly suggests these sites could be accessed from hijacked addresses. Moreover, various networks serving these websites were allowing traffic to move over their networks without a check of the route origin.” said Sweetser
It is the responsibility of network operators to ensure that routing infrastructure is secure and robust worldwide. Network safety depends on a routing infrastructure that prevents bad actors from causing havoc.
Sweetser added “Many of these networks provide services to important government services. Furthermore, under these circumstances, a routing hijack would adversely affect these networks and those services.”
In other words this means not all networks in Australia and New Zealand are working to keep their routing secure.
The research is timely, as the Australian Cyber Security Centre published updated guidelines to gateways earlier in the month including Border Gateway Protocol implementations.
