News Archives

Internet Alert Registry Site Mentioned in InformationWeek, CNET

February 24, 2008

Josh Karlin, a PhD student in the CS Dept, has a website hosted here at the CS Dept. called the Internet Alert Registry (IAR) which monitors Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates for suspicious routes. BGP is the routing protocol used to discover routes between the Internet's various networks.

The IAR was recently highlighted when an ISP in Pakistan, attempting to implement a government-ordered censoring of YouTube, inadvertently broadcast information that prevented users worldwide from accessing the wildly popular home of viral videos.

The incident, which lasted around 2 hours on February 24, 2008, was mentioned in InformationWeek as well as CNET, and the IAR was mentioned as a site helping to highlight the problem by listing dozens of potentially suspicious changes to BGP per day. A paper with co-authors Jennifer Rexford and Dept. Chair Stephanie Forrest, offers a way to greatly mitigate the security issues with BGP using an approach called Pretty Good BGP.