About the FORT Project
Objective
FORT is a joint initiative by LACNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean, and NIC.MX.
The goal of the project is to contribute to RPKI deployment as a means to render routing systems –a basic building block of Internet infrastructure– more secure and resilient. In turn, the project will contribute to preventing route hijacks and the exposing how vulnerabilities of the routing system impact on end-users’ ability to navigate the Internet freely and access information.
Context
Routing is one of the few components of Internet infrastructure that remains unsecure. Today, routing systems can be easily hijacked to conduct website blocks, eavesdrop on users through snooping and redirect traffic to bogus destinations. These vulnerabilities can prevent the free flow of information across the globe as well as threaten users’ security and privacy.
False route announcements –by accident or design– continue to happen and with frequency. Internet Society’s MANRS initiative (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security) reported almost 14,000 incidents in 2017.
Internet standard developing bodies have long struggled to identify strategies to render routing more secure. To date, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) has been the most successful initiative to secure BGP routing, by resorting to the use of signatures as a means to validate the authenticity of IP routing information, preventing route hijacks and snooping.
Validator and Tracking Tool
LACNIC will keep an RPKI validator in continuous development. This software allows operators to validate the BGP routing information against the RPKI repository for use in router configuration and resolution. Alongside the development of the Validator, LACNIC and NIC.MX coordinate an RPKI deployment campaign with four regional partners within Latin America and the Caribbean. The goal will be to make routing infrastructure more secure in the region.
In addition, the project team has developed an open access, digital tool to document routing incidents and identify regional trends in route hijacks. The tracking tool has a user interface where users are able to view data and generate simple customized graphs based on the parameters such as time range, countries to be compared, among others. The primary goal of this tracking tool is to expose intentional hijacks that infringe users security, privacy and free access to information in the Internet, drawing a link between core infrastructure and Internet Freedom.