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Comment by Liblor | Hacker News Reader

A professor at my University mentioned that when he was a student, the professors at that time claimed that the security of BGP is a solved problem and nobody is going to talk about it in ~2 years. This was +20 years ago. He has spent a lot of his research on an alternative for BGP called SCION[1], as the adaption of BGPSec is not very straight forward and rather an ugly fix. I think it is pretty interesting that the problems of BGP are not discussed more widely and often.

[1] https://www.scion-architecture.net/

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I worked for a big European network vendor and ended up on a project trying to sort out the utter mess that is legacy SS7.

SS7 networks are basically wide open, with no auth and anyone can get an SS7 hub for cheap and start sending nefarious commands to peoples handsets. They can forward or record calls and read SMS. They can track you or they could just be a jerk and keep rebooting your phone. Worse still it can be used to intercept 2FA codes over SMS, which is the approach a lot of banks are taking for personal account security. intelligence agencies are without a doubt using it for intercepting and tracking.

The Telcos are lost with how to address the issues combined with cost considerations, so most are taking the approach of hoping it stays out of the news and waiting for it to eventually be deprecated from the network.

I hope in the long the telco world will adopt the internet approach of treating the network as untrusted.

Ah Adrian! Yes his SCION is quite impressive and has plenty of cool features, but if it will ever outgrow the “future internet” technology phase remains to be seen.

I (other account) once submitted their work to HN to see what real smart people thought about it, but it got 0 traction.

Where was that banner image taken for the scion website? I'm curious to know.

There has been tooling for generating proper route filtering for quite some time now, the problem is virtually nobody uses it.

that is not the same thing, and does not fix the peering problem.

I'm not sure what you mean because it basically is the same thing just without cryptographic surety. And the "peering problem" is absolutely solved with proper route filtering...

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