Company
Date Published
Author
Vasilis Giotsas, Cefan Daniel Rubin, and Marwan Fayed
Word count
4001
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

On July 8, 2022, a massive outage at Rogers, a major Canadian telecom provider, highlighted the critical importance of Internet resilience, which refers to a network's ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from disruptions. Unlike mere reliability or robustness, resilience encompasses diverse and secure routing paths, rapid connectivity restoration, and the collective interaction of thousands of autonomous networks. This resilience is built upon diverse physical infrastructure, secure routing practices, and competitive market structures. Local decisions in network configurations significantly impact global connectivity, with the Internet's decentralized structure being both a strength and a challenge for resilience measurement. The document outlines a data-driven framework for assessing Internet resilience using publicly available data, focusing on metrics such as interconnection patterns, route hygiene, and economic-weighted metrics. The framework emphasizes the role of practices like RPKI, ROV, multi-homing, and participation in Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) to enhance resilience. Additionally, it discusses the impact of submarine cables and inter-domain routing on resilience, advocating for the implementation of best practices and public measurement platforms to foster a more stable and secure Internet.