A Year in Internet Analysis: 2023

11/01/2024

A Year in Internet Analysis: 2023

Por Doug Madory – Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik

Originally published in Kentik Blog

Summary

In this post, Doug Madory reviews the highlights of his wide-ranging internet analysis from the past year, which included covering the state of BGP (both routing leaks and progress in RPKI), submarine cables (both cuts and another historic activation), major outages, and how geopolitics has shaped the internet in 2023.


It’s the end of another eventful year on the internet, and time for another end-of-year recap of the analysis we’ve published since our last annual recap. This year, we’ve organized the pieces into three broad categories: BGP analysis, outage analysis, and finally, submarine cables and geopolitics. We hope you find this annual summary insightful.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) analysis

In June, I published my post, A Brief History of the Internet’s Biggest BGP Incidents, which began as a section I wrote for the 2022 Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) comprehensive report on internet routing security. The piece began with the AS7007 leak of 1997 and covered the most notable and significant BGP incidents in the history of the internet, from traffic-disrupting BGP leaks to crypto-stealing BGP hijacks. It intended to familiarize the reader with the major events that shape our understanding of the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of BGP.

In May, my friend Job Snijders of Fastly and I published updated RPKI ROV adoption numbers based on our measurement approach from last year. While the degree to which RPKI-invalids are rejected didn’t change noticeably from the previous year, the number of ROAs created continues to climb. The additional ROAs serve to increase the share of internet traffic eligible for the protection that RPKI ROV offers.

In fact, ROAs are being created at such a clip that the number of globally routed IPv4 BGP routes with ROAs will overtake those without at some point in the next year. IPv6 routes are already there. I’ve posted a survey on LinkedIn and X/Twitter to gather predictions from my fellow BGP nerds.

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Additional reading:

The above analysis was cited three times by speakers at the FCC’s Border Gateway Protocol Security Workshop held on July 31 in Washington D.C. My friend Tony Tauber, Engineering Fellow at Comcast, cited this analysis to argue that traffic data (i.e., NetFlow) suggests that we’re farther along in RPKI ROV adoption than the raw counts of BGP routes might suggest. Another friend of mine, Nimrod Levy of AT&T, cited our observation that a route that is evaluated as RPKI-invalid will have its propagation reduced by 50% or more.

Slide from Doug Montgomery of NIST, including the pie chart above in a slide at the workshop.

In addition, I dug into a couple of BGP leak incidents this year. At the beginning of the year, I used two route leaks to explore the impacts on traffic using our extensive NetFlow data. A common concern with a routing leak is the misdirection of traffic through a suboptimal path, but the other, often greater impact, is how much traffic is simply dropped due to congested links or high latencies.

The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.

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