Good Practices for Resilient Internet Interconnections

There may well not be any immediate cause for concern about the resilience of the Internet interconnections, but there is certainly cause for concern about the lack of good information about how it works and how well it might work if something went very badly wrong.

Published under Internet Infrastructure

In this context, ENISA began a study in 2011 on Good Practices for Resilient Internet Interconnections.The objective of this study was to assess technical issues (e.g. logical, physical, application layers, replication and diversity of services and data, data centres), peering and transit issues (e.g. SLAs), market, policy and regulatory issues.

More exactly, ENISA aimed to:

• Study the market and economical forces that drive the interconnection of AS, especially the SLAs, the inter operator agreements, the prices and incentives, and how these affect its security and resilience
• Identify the technical good practices that would make the interconnection system more resilient (e.g., interdomain routing capabilities, traffic engineering, routing during crises, backbone networks to be used as digital bunkers during crisis)
• Study the technical and policy aspects of traffic prioritisation
• To engage the involved actors into a structural dialogue on the risks and threats to interconnected networks
• Investigate the existence and terms of inter-operator mutual aid assistance agreements

The full report can be found here.

This work has been a follow up to the first ENISA study on ’Resilience of the Interconnection Ecosystem’ . Also the ENISA studies on ‘Secure routing and State-of-the-art deployment and impact on network resilience’ have been the source of useful information on the technical practices for secure interdomain routing.

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