Who Controls The Internet?

The title of the paper Who controls the Internet? Analyzing global threats using property traversal graphs is enough to ensnare any Internet researcher. The control plane for a number of attacks, as the paper points out, is the DNS due to the role it plays in mapping names to resources. MX records in the DNS control the flow of mail, CNAME records are used to implement content delivery networks (CDN) services, and TXT records are used to confirm access to and control over a namespace when implementing third party services. This post will cover an interesting case where control is exercised first via the DNS and then using BGP.
Below the DNS, in the depths of internet plumbing, is the lizard brain of internet routing, which is governed by the border gateway protocol (BGP). A common term to describe BGP routing is “hot potato” routing. BGP conversations occur between autonomous systems, ASes, which are identified by their autonomous system number ASN. The ASN represents a system of networks and the policy associated with their routing. ASes are issued regionally by Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which receive blocks of AS numbers to hand out from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Continue reading
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