Could the internet ever be switched off or destroyed?

Chris Baraniuk investigates what it would take

to bring down the network we all now rely on.

'The internet is unbreakable. At least, we think it is. Thats why when something goes extremely viral,
such as pictures of Kim Kardashians bottom or #thedress, we joke about it breaking the internet. This
is because, well, that obviously isnt going to happen but were searching for some way of
exaggerating the impact of the event. Its a great piece of contemporary hyperbole. But could you really,
literally, break the internet? And if so, does anyone really know for sure what would happen next?
Part of the answer lies in Londons Docklands district: nestled just north-east of Canary Wharf is a
large, unassuming building. Its grey, monolithic exterior is surrounded by a metal fence and there are
security cameras dotted along its windowless walls. No hoardings or signage explains to passers-by
what it is, or to whom it belongs. But it houses a substantial node in the internet. Its called Linx, the
London Internet Exchange, and its one of the biggest points of traffic exchange on the internet
anywhere in the world. There are bigger exchanges out there, but not as many as you might think.
Matthew Prince, CEO of content delivery network CloudFlare, puts the number of large facilities like
Linx at around 30.
These buildings, scattered across the globe, are where networks from providers like Virgin or Comcast
come together to exchange their traffic. That, after all, is the whole point of an inter-net. And if any of
them were cut off by a power cut or earthquake, for instance we would know about it.

You would actually see regional disruptions on the internet, says Prince. And if you were able to
actually take out all 30 of those buildings, the internet itself would probably largely cease to function.
This sort of doomsday scenario isnt very likely or feasible, though. These kinds of important internet
facilities are extremely well protected, says Jack Waters, CTO of Level 3 one of a handful of Tier 1
network providers that are also crucial, because their big and resilient networks help form the backbone
of the internet.

We have surveillance everywhere, we take all the appropriate precautions around barricades and
those sorts of things. They are very hardened facilities, he says. There has never been a known
sabotage attempt at one of Level 3s many buildings, he adds.
Perhaps cutting the links between such places, then, would be an easier way to break the internet?
There are uncountable miles of cables wrapped around the globe, and many of the biggest are just
lying there unprotected albeit often underwater. Indeed, cables do sometimes get severed just by
accident, for instance during earthquakes or when ships anchors slice through them on the seabed. Its
believed that significant internet disruptions in 2008 that affected countries including Egypt were caused
by these sort of cable breaks.

Distributed resilience
But the effects of these failures in the physical infrastructure of the net arent as far-reaching as you
might think, because they come up against the original designed resilience of the system. Its people
like Paul Baran, a Polish-born American engineer, who we can thank for this. Baran is one of a few
people who, way back in the early 1960s, believed a communications network could be designed with
significant physical survivability, to withstand even a nuclear attack.
He wrote many fascinating papers about it, but at first no-one took him seriously. It might have stayed
like that except for Donald Davies, a Welsh computer scientist, who came up with the same
fundamental idea as Baran, completely independently and at almost exactly the same time. Their idea
was called packet-switching and it describes a communications protocol that breaks messages down
into small blocks, or packets. These are fired across a network via the fastest route available
whatever that route is until they all arrive at their destination, where they are then reassembled. Take
out one link in the network, even an important one, and messages can still arrive where they are
expected by taking one of the many alternative routes.
Its really clever. Its a spectacular architecture when you think about it, says Waters. End-to-end
communication where the end points dont care about what is in the middle is a very powerful idea.
Thats why cutting cables or throwing data centres offline does limited damage to the network at large.
Even disconnecting entire regions, like Syria, wont necessarily restrict internal communications within
Syrian networks though of course access to external websites like Google may no longer be possible.
Eventually, though, people realised that the internets wonderful capacity to re-route traffic could be
used against it. One such way is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a huge flow of
traffic is deliberately sent to servers which cant cope with the overload. DDoS attacks are becoming
more and more common, and they are one of the threats which CloudFlare and other networks are
designed to protect their clients against, says Prince. The ultra-high capacity of the CloudFlare network
can simply absorb this bad traffic and redirect it, so that public websites under attack remain online.
But dealing with the problem is getting more difficult all the time.

Were definitely seeing an increase in the number of attacks, and an increase in the size and scale of
those attacks, explains Prince. It becomes so easy to do them that sometimes theyre even used by
rival businesses. We saw two feuding day spas the other day that were launching denial of service
attacks against each other.

Border breach
Another major concern is BGP hijacking. BGP stands for border gateway protocol. This is a key
system which tells internet traffic those billions of packets where to go. For a long time it was just
assumed that the BGP routers positioned at various points across the network always sent the packets
in the right direction. In recent years, however, it emerged that traffic could be surreptitiously re-directed
if the destination information logged in the routers got manipulated, perhaps by hackers. Such hijacking
would mean that huge swathes of internet data could effectively be stolen, or snooped on by third
parties, such as intelligence agencies.
The other potential consequence is that large portions of traffic could get sent to areas of the network
that are more easily overwhelmed. Something like this happened a few years ago when Pakistans
government tried to stop people in the country watching YouTube. BGP routes in Pakistan were
changed, but this information was copied around the world. Huge numbers of people couldnt access
YouTube and all the traffic was instead sent to Pakistan, where the network infrastructure was quickly
overloaded. Its even been theorised that overloading routers with BGP updates could knock the entire
internet offline.
Re-routed traffic can cause unexpected headaches for the people who try to keep servers and online
systems running. One blogger recently investigated what had sent a mail server offline only to discover
mistakenly re-routed traffic was the cause. While looking at IP addresses in my logs, I noticed
something interesting: all of this traffic was coming from China, he wrote.
However, although most of these problems have been known to cause disruption and some could,
in theory, break the internet theres never been a case where the whole internet has gone down. That
doesnt mean we shouldnt think about the possibility, though, says Vincent Chan, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Worst case

I think a massive attack to bring down the whole internet is actually possible, he says. He points out
that physical attacks on the internets infrastructure are unlikely to do much permanent damage.
Destroying one node in a 1,000 node network wont take the whole network down, of course. But what if
you find a software vulnerability that affects all 1,000 nodes? Then youve got a problem.

In that case, its not a 1,000 point independent failure, its only a one point failure, he says. And Chan
points out that there are methods of disrupting the internet that would be very hard to detect. In his lab
hes experimented with splicing a data signal and inserting high levels of noise. You could do this, he
says, by going to low security junction boxes in remote locations around the world and simply putting a
sabotaging black box between the electronics and the fibre optic cables.

The worst thing to do would be if you put enough noise into the signal so that the system actually is
not completely down, but it is so error prone that most of the packets that come through are
unreadable, he explains. The network would constantly have to ask for retransmission and it might
slow down to, say, 1% of its capacity. The people running the network wouldnt know what hit them.
They would just think that it was exceptionally busy.
Chan thinks there might be some who would be tempted to attack the internet in this way. But the
consequences of breaking the internet may not always be properly thought through. I think there
should be discussions of attack and defence of the internet as an entity, he says. Thats never been
discussed before adequately.

Dark net
Banks, commerce, government systems, personal communication, appliances a lot of our modern
world relies on the internet staying up. Localised, temporary disruption is little more than a nuisance.
But if the internet really went dark, wed be in trouble.
The real problem, though, is that we dont know exactly how bad the trouble would be. Danny Hillis, an
early pioneer of internet technology, pointed this out to an audience at TED in 2013.

Nobody really exactly understands all the things [the internet is] being used for right now, he
commented. We dont know what the consequences of an effective denial of service attack on the
internet would be.
Frustratingly, though, because there has never been such a full-scale denial of service, no-one seems
too worried about Hilliss warning that the internet could one day crash. He realised this. Its hard to get
people to focus on Plan B when Plan A seems to be working so well, he said.
Since Hilliss talk there hasnt been much more debate about this problem. And yet, every day the
internet gets bigger and more indispensable. The truth is, we need the internet so much that no-one
wants to think about it not being there. But maybe, one day, that may come back to haunt us.'