Most Severe Security Hole Ever Discovered Threatens Most Of The Internet

A "huge" security hole in the Internet Protocol may be the biggest security exploit ever discovered, say security experts Alex Pilosov and Anton Kapela, who have just revealed that the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, allows hackers to redirect traffic at will.

Far from being a patchable hole, it's the fundamental design of the BGP, which manages and optimizes internet traffic, that allows this potentially malicious manipulation of traffic. A nasty hacker could re-route traffic to his or her own server and forward that traffic without interrupting any other connections or otherwise signaling an attack.

By design the BGP "requires an explicit level of trust," and a new standard, Secure BGP, has only recently been developed. With Secure BGP, designed by BBN Technologies' Stephen Kent, each online router would be mandated to sign its own routing map data and allow providers to choose whether or not to accept any changes.

Not that there have been any major attacks using BGP, but with the DNS exploit revealed earlier in the year, 2008 has seen some potentially scary exploits living inside the intertubes.

'Huge' exploit threatens most Internet data [Electronista]