As9583

Post to determine whether or not NIXI carries full Indian routing table?

After my last post about home networking, I am jumping back into global routing. More specifically how Indian traffic is hitting the globe when it does not need to. This is an old discussion across senior management folks in telcos, policymakers, and more. It’s about “Does Indian internet traffic routes from outside of India?” and if the answer is yes then “Why?” and “How much?”

It became a hot topic, especially after the Snowden leaks. There was even an advisory back in 2018 from Deputy National Security Advisor to ensure Indian internet traffic stays local (news here). Over time this has come up a few dozen times in my discussion with senior members from the Indian ISP community, individuals, and even latency-sensitive gamers. So I am going to document some of that part here. I am going to put whatever can be verified publically and going to avoid putting any private discussions I had with friends in these respective networks. The data specially traceroutes will have measurement IDs from RIPE Atlas so they can be independently verified by other network engineers.

It has been some time since I started pushing Indian community for hosting RIPE Atlas Probes. These probes are small devices designed to be hosted at end user’s connection and do pre-defined as well as user-defined measurement. Measurement includes ping, trace, DNS lookup, SSL check etc. Currently, there are 61 active RIPE Atlas probes. I would say it has +/- of 7-8 probes which go offline and come back online when I request hosts to check.

Today BGPmon reported about possible BGP prefix hijack of Amazon’s IP address space. Amazon announces 50.16.0.0/16 from AS14618.

At 13:45:44 UTC / 19:15:44 IST D-Vois broadband started originating a more specific 50.16.226.0/24 in the table from AS45769. One of example AS_PATH of this announcement: 198290 197264 197264 197264 29467 1299 9583 45769 Clearly, this leak was carried over by AS9583 (Sify) to AS1299 (Telia) and was carried over to rest of internet from there. There was a visible withdrawal of this request by 14:17:37 UTC / 19:47:37 IST.