Echoes
In 1989, two engineers sketched the internet's trust architecture on napkins. Thirty-seven years later, one country is trying to redraw it.
Echoes
In 1989, two engineers sketched the internet's trust architecture on napkins. Thirty-seven years later, one country is trying to redraw it.
Why the Internet Still Trusts Strangers
In June 2024, a Brazilian ISP announced Cloudflare's IP address as its own, and the internet believed it. DNS resolution dropped across 300 networks in 70 countries. The routes were cryptographically signed. A major carrier accepted the bogus announcement anyway.
The routing protocol that failed was sketched on two napkins in 1989 as a temporary fix. Thirty-seven years and multiple security layers later, it still assumes every participant can be trusted. The patches are real, the progress measurable. Somewhere, a working replacement already carries production traffic. The distance between that fact and the rest of the internet is wider than you'd expect, and not for technical reasons.
Why the Internet Still Trusts Strangers
In June 2024, a Brazilian ISP announced Cloudflare's IP address as its own, and the internet believed it. DNS resolution dropped across 300 networks in 70 countries. The routes were cryptographically signed. A major carrier accepted the bogus announcement anyway.
The routing protocol that failed was sketched on two napkins in 1989 as a temporary fix. Thirty-seven years and multiple security layers later, it still assumes every participant can be trusted. The patches are real, the progress measurable. Somewhere, a working replacement already carries production traffic. The distance between that fact and the rest of the internet is wider than you'd expect, and not for technical reasons.
The Patch Paradox
BGP's vulnerability was never really technical. It was a coordination problem dressed in protocol clothing. The system assumed honest peers. No verification. Just trust.
RPKI, the cryptographic patch meant to solve this, works through an entirely different mechanism. But it runs on the same fuel. Signing your routes only matters if others validate them. Validating only pays off if others sign. The single best predictor of adoption turns out to be adoption itself.
So the fix doesn't just address the coordination failure. It inherits it whole.
Chokepoints and Consequences
The HTTPS Exception
The entire web upgraded its security posture in about five years. For foundational internet infrastructure, that kind of change almost never happens. The conditions that made HTTPS possible turn out to be so specific they raise an uncomfortable question: a free certificate authority, a dominant browser willing to punish holdouts, and a search engine rewarding compliance, all arriving within a narrow window. What about the parts of the internet where no single actor holds that kind of leverage?
Trust by Design
In April 2018, a small hosting company in Ohio told the internet's core routers it was Amazon Web Services. The routers believed it. They had no mechanism to do otherwise. The protocol that directs traffic between networks was designed for a world of cooperating institutions that trusted each other. That world disappeared decades ago. The protocol kept running. Patches keep accumulating on top. And unlike the web, no chokepoint exists to force a real upgrade.
Further Routing
Past Articles
At 03:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, a counter running since 1970 will hit its maximum value and wrap to a date in Decem...
In the early 1970s, someone at Bell Labs made a quiet decision about how C would store text. No memo survives. That choi...
In 1994, a software engineer whose server had just been crashed by someone's web crawler proposed a fix: a plain text fi...
Between 2009 and today, billions of people clicked through grid squares identifying crosswalks, storefronts, and traffic...