FROM THE NEW SCIENTIST

The cyberweapon that could take down the internet

A new cyberweapon could take down the entire internet – and there's not much that current defences can do to stop it. So say Max Schuchard at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues, the masterminds who have created the digital ordnance. But thankfully they have no intention of destroying the net just yet. Instead, they are suggesting improvements to its defences.

Schuchard's new attack pits the structure of the internet against itself. Hundreds of connection points in the net fall offline every minute, but we don't notice because the net routes around them. It can do this because the smaller networks that make up the internet, known as autonomous systems, communicate with each other through routers. When a communication path changes, nearby routers inform their neighbours through a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). These routers inform other neighbours in turn, eventually spreading knowledge of the new path throughout the internet.

A previously discovered method of attack, dubbed ZMW – after its three creators Zhang, Mao and Wang, researchers in the US who came up with their version four years ago – disrupts the connection between two routers by interfering with BGP to make it appear that the link is offline. Schuchard and colleagues worked out how to spread this disruption to the entire internet and simulated its effects.

Surgical strike

The attack requires a large botnet – a network of computers infected with software that allows them to be externally controlled: Schuchard reckons 250,000 such machines would be enough to take down the internet. Botnets are often used to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which bring web servers down by overloading them with traffic, but this new line of attack is different.

"Normal DDoS is a hammer; this is more of a scalpel," says Schuchard. "If you cut in the wrong places then the attack won't work."

An attacker deploying the Schuchard cyberweapon would send traffic between computers in their botnet to build a map of the paths between them. Then they would identify a link common to many different paths and launch a ZMW attack to bring it down. Neighbouring routers would respond by sending out BGP updates to reroute traffic elsewhere. A short time later, the two sundered routers would reconnect and send out their own BGP updates, upon which attack traffic would start flowing in again, causing them to disconnect once more. This cycle would repeat, with the single breaking and reforming link sending out waves of BGP updates to every router on the internet. Eventually each router in the world would be receiving more updates than it could handle – after 20 minutes of attacking, a queue requiring 100 minutes of processing would have built up.

Clearly, that's a problem. "Routers under extreme computational load tend to do funny things," says Schuchard. With every router in the world preoccupied, natural routing outages wouldn't be fixed, and eventually the internet would be so full of holes that communication would become impossible. Shuchard thinks it would take days to recover.

"Once this attack got launched, it wouldn't be solved by technical means, but by network operators actually talking to each other," he says. Each autonomous system would have to be taken down and rebooted to clear the BGP backlog.

READ MORE

THE MOSCOW NEWS

Russia to splash out billions on anti-diving device

by Andy Potts at 11/02/2011

Once upon a time diving was just an ordinary Olympic sport – but when Sochi hosts the 2014 winter games there will be a sinister new focus on underwater antics.

Such are the fears of sub-aqua saboteurs that Russia is about to spend 14 billion roubles ($476 million) on a special “crustacean” weapon to painlessly disperse frogmen from the beaches of the Black Sea.

But maritime Spetsnaz officers may not have much luck with attempts to use hi-tech sonar pulses to thwart unwanted guests – many experts have dismissed the plans as unworkable and unjustified.

Safety first

The plan is to commission an underwater weapon which sends a targeted shockwave towards any suspect intruders as they swim to shore.

From a distance of 80 metres, saboteurs would be hit with a force equivalent to 15 atmospheres, generated by sonar pulses. If the devices operated out of the water, the sound waves would be at around 215 dB, gzt.ru reported.

Effectively, therefore, the device is a giant megaphone conditioned to send powerful ripples through water rather than amplify noise through the air.

And it is hoped that this will be safer than the current “best practice” of launching grenades at renegade divers.

Why bother?

There are growing fears that terrorists could use divers to prepare an attack on a major event like the winter Olympics.

And sabotage swimmers have been blamed by some for the destruction of the warship Novorossiysk in 1955 in one of the most famous Soviet maritime mysteries.

More recently, the Philippines’ military claimed in 2005 that it had evidence that South-East Asian terrorist groups with links to Al Qaeda were planning scuba divers for attacks at sea.


READ MORE