One-fourth of Internet users worldwide reside in nations that are more vulnerable than previously believed to targeted attacks on their Internet infrastructure. The Global South is home to several of at-risk nations.
The University of California San Diego’s computer experts came at that conclusion after conducting a thorough, extensive study. 75 nations were surveyed by the researchers.
“We wanted to study the topology of the Internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose an entire nation’s traffic,” said Alexander Gamero-Garrido, the paper’s first author, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at UC San Diego.
At the Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2022 online this spring, researchers presented their findings.
In different places of the world, the Internet’s structure might vary greatly. In many developed nations, like the United States, there is fierce competition among Internet service providers to serve a sizable customer base.
These networks have direct connections to one another and engage in direct peering, the exchange of content. Additionally, each provider has access to the global Internet infrastructure directly.
“But a large portion of the Internet doesn’t function with peering agreements for network connectivity,” Gamero-Garrido pointed out.
In other countries, many of which are still developing, the vast majority of Internet users rely on a small number of providers, with one of these serving an overwhelming majority of customers.
In addition, those providers depend on a small group of businesses known as transit autonomous systems to access the international Internet and traffic from other nations. Researchers discovered that these vendors of transit autonomous systems are frequently state-owned.
We wanted to study the topology of the Internet to find weak links that, if compromised, would expose an entire nation’s traffic. But a large portion of the Internet doesn’t function with peering agreements for network connectivity.
Alexander Gamero-Garrido
Obviously, this makes nations with this kind of Internet infrastructure highly vulnerable to attacks because all it takes is for a few transit autonomous systems to be compromised. Of course, these nations are equally at risk in the event of an outage at a major Internet provider.
In the worst situation, all passengers are served by a single transit autonomous system. This situation is very similar to that in Sierra Leone and Cuba. In contrast, after the government allowed for private entrepreneurship in that area of the economy, Bangladesh went from having just two to over 30 system providers.
This emphasizes the significance of government control when it comes to the availability of transportation autonomous systems and Internet service providers in a nation. For instance, researchers were shocked to see that a large portion of submarine Internet cable operators are state-owned as opposed to commercially run.
Additionally, colonialism was detected in the Global South’s Internet structure. For instance, the French corporation Orange is well-represented in some African nations.
The data from the Border Gateway Protocol, which monitors routing and reachability information transfers across autonomous systems on the Internet, was used by the researchers. They are aware that the data may be lacking, which could result in errors, but that these are minimized by the approach used for the study and its validation with actual, local Internet service providers.
The following procedures include determining how vulnerable and how linked important facilities, including hospitals, are online.
