Shared infrastructure often works because its parts trust one another. A technique that uses that trust, rather than breaking anything, can be hard to see.

A Tactic That Uses Routing as Designed

Wired reported that a tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet traffic anywhere in the world.

In general terms, a risk of this kind sits less in one program than in how the parts of a network agree to pass traffic along.

From Disruption to Invisible Surveillance

Wired described the step that makes the tactic hard to notice. Pilosov's innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

An outage is usually something people notice. If traffic still arrives where it was going, there may be little to prompt anyone to look, which could make interception of this kind harder to spot.

Changing how a widely shared system works can require many parties to act together, which may be one reason such systems change slowly. A risk that leaves no visible trace may also attract less pressure for change than one that causes obvious failures.

For anyone who builds or runs a shared system, one practical question follows. Which signals would show that something is wrong when nothing has stopped working? Watching only for outages may leave some kinds of misuse unseen. Checks on where traffic actually travels, or on which parties are trusted to direct it, could be one way to look, though each such check adds its own cost and its own blind spots.

Perhaps the harder risks to manage are the ones that cause no visible failure at all.

Sources