A Diagnosis of Routing Incidents in Latin America and the Caribbean

30/01/2020

Routing incidents and route hijacking have decreased in the last three years in Latin America and the Caribbean thanks to the region’s commitment to achieving a secure and resilient network. To continue protecting Internet user freedom, these efforts should be furthered with the support of the resource validation tools that are available. These are some of the conclusions of the first diagnosis included in the report titled “Routing Security in Latin America and the Caribbean,” an initiative of the FORT Project by LACNIC and NIC Mexico.

FORT is a project that seeks to increase the security of Internet routing systems through resource certification, using a validator developed by a team of experts working at LACNIC and NIC Mexico with the support of the Open Technology Fund.

This study detected that the number of routing incidents in the region has been falling over the past three years. While in 2017 almost 5,000 routing incidents were recorded, last year ended with approximately 3,000 incidents. “More than 70% of these incidents occur in Brazil. This is the country with the second highest number of registered ASNs (the first is the United States), so a large part of the region’s numbers depends on the work of their network operators,” the report warns.

Augusto Mathurin, one of the experts working on the FORT project and author of the report, notes that, the situation in Brazil has improved compared to two years ago, just as in most of Latin America and the Caribbean. However, better figures do not mean that organizations in the region should assume that the problem has been solved, the report states.

In this sense, the report urges governments to promote a censorship-free environment and to accompany it with policies for the deployment of technologies that will help create a secure and reliable network. It also asks the technical community to work on mitigating the vulnerabilities of current protocols and civil society to support the monitoring of connectivity anomalies suffered by various communities so that they can file a complaint when appropriate.

Finally, it encourages network operators —key players in ensuring the health of the routing system— to use tools to generate their prefix certification through the LACNIC portal and to perform resource validation using the FORT validator.

Click here to read the full report.