James’ World

YouTube disappeared from the Internet on Feb 24 after a Pakistani ISP tried to block it by advertising a more specific route in BGP.

BGP is used mainly for routing, but you can also do geographical load-balancing with it.

It’s unlikely that secure BGP will take off anytime soon because of the overhead involved.

But companies may consider advertising only /24 blocks to prevent others from being able to advertise more specific routes. The downside to that is bigger routing tables and more memory required to hold them for everybody.

cnet.com: How Pakistan knocked YouTube offline (and how to make sure it never happens again)
arstechnica.com: Insecure routing redirects YouTube to Pakistan
NANOG thread: YouTube IP Hijacking
Internet-Wide Catastrophe—Last Year

Free Keynote Internet Health Report
Renesys Blog
BG4.AS
BGPlay
wikipedia: BGP, Autonomous System
cnet.com: YouTube disappears from the screen temporarily

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Business, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.