EuroWire January 2016

Transatlantic Cable

surprisingly, there does not exist a good reference to these Internet locations that, if taken out, would severely hamper the system. “Everybody assumes somebody knows, but after a while you nd out nobody actually knows,” Paul Barford, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin, told the Times . Dr Barford, who has made it his mission to locate the vulnerabilities – the “points of failure” cited by Allied Fiber’s Mr Newby – recently completed a map of the long-haul Internet infrastructure of the USA. ‘Avoid giving bad guys a map’ The e ort to draw an even reasonably reliable map of stretches of at least 30 miles of Internet connectivity among population centres of at least 100,000 people required four years of gathering information from commercial broadband providers and public records. Notably, observed Ms Murphy, Dr Barford’s research was partly funded by the US Department of Homeland Security and can be accessed only by DHS-approved researchers. “What we’re trying to avoid is giving bad guys a map to do bad things,” he said. “Now that we can see the possible pinch points in the US, we are looking at ways to mitigate them.” Security experts and networking engineers said they were most concerned about where major networks converge: Internet exchange points, or IXPs, where networks come together like highway interchanges to trade tra c, a process known as “peering.”Ms Murphy provided this basic information: † There are about 80 IXPs in the USA but only a handful, including those in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle and outside Washington, are vital interchanges for domestic as well as international tra c carried by undersea cables from abroad (also vulnerable to cuts by mislaid anchors or submarine sabotage); † Plugging into these major hubs are hundreds of Internet and mobile service providers, as well as content delivery networks such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. If taken out by natural disaster (earthquake, hurricane) or a strategic attack, much of the USA, if not much of the world, would have hindered Internet access or none at all, depending on the severity and sophistication of the strikes.

Telecom

Beyond cybersecurity: sabotage of bre optic cables in Northern California imperils tech, academia, and USA national security “I always remind people that planet Earth is a single point of failure. Just ask the dinosaurs.” Hunter Newby, the founder and CEO of New York-based Allied Fiber, made this observation to the New York Times in reference to a series of so-called bre cuts in the San Francisco Bay Area – at least 16 of them over the last year. His company builds alternative dark bre networks that customers can “light” (ie shoot data through them using laser pulses akin to Morse code) to diversify their routing. “Think of dark bre networks as private access toll roads you can jump into to avoid tra c jams,” wrote the Times ’s Kate Murphy, whose coverage of the Bay Area bre cuts makes plain why such expedients have become necessary and are gaining in adoption. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), someone or some group has been going through manholes to sever bre optic cables that supply telecommunications to large sections of the region, which is home to technology companies, academic institutions, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, overseer of the USA’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. (“The Cyberthreat Under the Street,” 7 th November) As reported by Ms Murphy, following each incident (usually occurring late at night and involving two or three separate bre cuts) residents could not make land or mobile calls, not even to the emergency number 911; or send texts or emails; or use credit cards or ATMs or watch TV. Online medical records could not be accessed. Wired households lost their enviable interconnected e ciencies. (For security reasons, the Lawrence Livermore lab declined to say how the cuts a ected its operations.) Central to all these interruptions is the Internet which, Ms Murphy observed, is not amorphous. She wrote: “You may access it wirelessly, but ultimately you’re relying on a bunch of physical cables that are vulnerable to attack. It’s something that’s been largely forgotten in the lather over cybersecurity. The threat is not only malicious code owing through the pipes but also, and perhaps more critically, the pipes themselves.” Of major concern to experts are the throughways and junctures that handle enormous amounts of Internet tra c; and,

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

“It’s crazy to see . . . unprotected buildings containing all this physical cabling that’s interconnecting continents as well as

36

www.read-eurowire.com

January 2016