Mind Your “MANRS” — The Factory Times

Feb 18

Feb 18 Mind Your “MANRS”

In terms of how the Internet works, at least on a day-to-day basis, few people give much (if any) thought to how all our data traffic in and of itself is delivered around the globe at lightning speeds. I turn on my phone or computer, and since it’s already configured, it just connects. I click a bookmark in my browser and the page I want comes up. The truth of the matter is there exists an Internet Ecosystem, composed of organizations and communities of individuals, from across different companies and organizations themselves, who do their professional best to ensure that the Internet’s traffic keeps flowing in an orderly fashion. This Internet Ecosystem also ensures that the Internet is constantly evolving as new technology proves itself over time.

Managing the Internet Ecosystem is a monumental task. The individual team players are myriad; technologists, engineers, architects, creatives, global and local organizations, operators, vendors, Internet users, educators, and policy and decision-makers. Chief among those players is an organization - aptly named the Internet Society - that lays out the basic organizing principles that the rest of the ecosystem runs on. Two other important organizations involved in the evolution and management of the Internet are the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who help coordinate and implement the open standards we all use whenever we do things like order a pizza through an app on our phone, or when we sign up online to get COVID-19 vaccinations. Groups, both loosely and tightly organized, keep the backbones of our modern technological lives up and running without much fanfare.

One of the latest initiatives from the Internet Society is known as the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS). In terms of keeping the traffic flowing over the Internet, a big chunk of the processes involved are centered around preventing security incidents with the publication of what are known as routes. As the name might suggest, all traffic must have a route in order to be transmitted across the network. That also means that in order to access the Internet, or most any network for that matter, traffic must pass through a device known as a router. The larger the amount of traffic, the larger the router, and the more individual routes the traffic will likely take to reach its destination. Routes are stored by routers in what are known as routing tables. These complex tables are maintained and published through route advertisements between Autonomous Systems (AS). AS are in turn assigned Autonomous System Numbers (ASN) by a centralized authority known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

The MANRS initiative, through its Fellowship and Ambassador Programs, aims to normalize the management of these routing tables across the operators of all AS. They’ve come up with four concrete actions to achieve normalization; filtering, anti-spoofing, coordination, and global validation. Filtering ensures the accuracy of an operator’s own route advertisements, and of the advertisements from their customers, to adjacent networks with prefix and what is known as AS-path granularity. Anti-spoofing enables source address validation for at least single-homed stub customer networks, the operators’ own end-users, and infrastructure. These two concepts, among other advantages, prevent rogue networks from advertising routes and stealing traffic otherwise headed for legitimate destinations. Coordination maintains globally accessible up-to-date contact information for everyone, and global validation publishes their data, so the Internet Ecosystem as a whole can validate routing information on a global scale.

The most recent example of these four principles in action was observed when the military-government of Myanmar ordered local telecommunications companies to hijack popular routes to the social media company Twitter, effectively stealing traffic that was supposed to be international-bound back into their own country instead. Route hijacking is a sophisticated attack that can either redirect traffic for malicious purposes, such as stealing usernames and passwords, or in this case, to dead-end the traffic so it never reaches its destination. As the military coup-d'etat is still being carried out, I personally hope a free and open Internet will stand with the citizens of Myanmar who are merely trying to get the word out on social media over what’s happening in their country.

On another personal note, I have a marked interest in these sorts of inner workings surrounding the Internet. So much so that I'm going to apply to the Internet Society's MANRS Fellowship Program for 2021. Both my academic & professional careers have given me valuable opportunities to sharpen my analytical & critical feedback skills. I'm also an outlier of sorts, in that I enjoy reviewing policy documents, so I feel like I’m prepared to make an impact, particularly as a Policy Analyst Fellow. I specialized in Information Technology for my associate's degree & then Networking for my bachelor's. Now that I'm about to finish a master's in Cybersecurity here with SUNY Polytechnic Institute, I realize I've been taking aim at Internet, routing, distributed denials of service (DDoS) & other actionable security issues that are often addressed by wide-ranging Communities of Interest (COI), for over two decades. If I can turn around and help those communities improve on existing policies, I think I should give it a shot.

I hope there are more folks like me out there who will also apply to be MANRS Fellows. They have three categories of fellows; I already mentioned I want to be a Policy Analyst, but there are also Researcher and Virtual / Online Trainer positions to be had. Each has a slightly different skill set and asks for practical experience in the networking field. If you have the time and the résumé, why not apply?