About a quarter of the world’s Internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to attacks targeting their Internet infrastructure. Many of the countries at risk are in the Global South.
This is what could be corroborated through a large-scale study carried out by computer scientists from the University of California at San Diego, who collected data from 75 countries.
The confidence that the Internet generates, despite the technical weaknesses that can be detected
The structure of the Internet can differ dramatically in different parts of the world. In many developed countries, a large number of Internet providers compete to provide services to a large number of users. These networks are directly connected to each other and exchange content, a process known as direct peering. All providers can also connect directly to the world’s Internet infrastructure.
“We wanted to study the topology of the Internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose the traffic of an entire nation”, he pointed Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper’s first author, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego.
In developing countries, most users rely on a limited number of providers for Internet access, with one provider accounting for the overwhelming majority of users. Not only that, but those providers rely on a limited number of companies called autonomous transit systems to gain access to the global Internet and traffic from other countries. The researchers found that these providers of autonomous transit systems are often owned by the state.
This makes countries with this type of Internet infrastructure particularly vulnerable to attack, because all that is needed is to cripple a small number of autonomous transit systems. These countries, of course, are also vulnerable if a major Internet provider experiences outages.
In the worst case, an autonomous transit system serves all users. Cuba and Sierra Leone are close to this state of affairs. By contrast, Bangladesh went from just two to more than 30 system providers, after the government opened up that sector of the economy to private enterprise.
This highlights the importance of government regulation when it comes to the number of Internet providers and autonomous transit systems available in a country. For example, researchers were surprised to discover that many submarine Internet cable operators are state-owned rather than private.
The researchers relied on data from the Border Gateway Protocol, which tracks routing and reachability information exchanges between autonomous systems on the Internet. They are aware that the data may be incomplete, introducing possible inaccuracies, although these are mitigated by the study methodology and validation with real Internet operators in the country.
The next steps in this project include looking at how critical facilities like hospitals are connected to the Internet and how vulnerable they are.
The details of the results of this study can be consulted here.
