BGP handling of obscure errors

▼ I read Ben Cartwright Cox' (extensive) blog post Grave flaws in BGP Error handling and then saw his talk about the same topic at NLNOG on Youtube.

The necessary background

In addition to the "well-known" BGP path attributes that we all know (because the RFC says we must) and love (because they make the internet work), it's also possible define new attributes to provide new functionality. These can be "transitive" attributes, which means that a BGP router that doesn't recognize them propagates them to its BGP neighbors unchanged.

The ability to create new optional transitive attributes has allowed us to run BGP version 4 for three decades without having to bump the version number because we had to make backward-incompatible changes that would make adoption all but impossible.

For instance, 32-bit autonomous system numbers were added as the 16-bit BGP AS numbers started to run out. In addition to the well-known (mandatory) 16-bit AS path, an optional 32-bit AS path was added. If a router in the middle didn't understand the 32-bit AS path, it would update the 16-bit AS path and propagate the 32-bit AS path unchanged.

The next 32-bit capable BGP router can then add back the AS numbers from the 16-bit path that are missing from the 32-bit path, and 32-bit AS numbers work even if routers in the middle don't understand them. (They just see "23456".)

Of course you can read all about BGP attributes in my book Internet Routing with BGP. It's even in the sample chapters! (Page 15.)

The error handling issue

In Ben's blog post, he talks about a Brazilian network included a malformed version of a still experimental attribute. All the big routers in the core of the internet don't run experiments, so they just saw an attribute they didn't recognize, and propagated it as per the transitive setting. Eventually BGP updates with the broken attribute arrived at routers that did understand the attribute, but saw that it was broken.

So as per the original BGP spec, they tore down the BGP session towards the router that sent them the broken attribute. And then, after a short delay, tried to set up a new BGP session towards that neighboring router. Only to encounter the same error again and tearing down the BGP session again. And so on.

Which is probably not wat you want. Which is nicely explained in RFC 7606, published in 2015, which suggests to treat such errors as if the neighboring router had asked to withdraw the route containing the offending path attribute. So if a neighbor tells me prefixes 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16 are reachable through them, and 172.16.0.0/12 has a broken attribute, I just act as if my neighbor had told me that 172.16.0.0/12 is not reachable through them. But I don't bring down the BGP session so 10.0.0.0/8 and 192.168.0.0/16 remain reachable through the neighbor in question.

Ben seems to be rather annoyed that many router vendors don't implement the RFC 7606 behavior, implement it but don't enable it by default, and/or don't have a bug bounty program to reward security researchers for pointing out these deficiencies. He spent a good amount of time evaluating different implementations and then "fuzzing" attributes to see what would happen, So that's somewhat understandable. Here is his score card from his presentation slides:

My take

I agree that the RFC 7606 handling by default is what you want. I also agree that changing a default here, something router vendors loathe to do, shouldn't be problematic.

However, these are pretty obscure errors. This is not an internet extinction level issue.

For my own network, I would strongly prefer a mechanism to turn off handling of these often rather frivolous new attributes. Both to avoid being bitten by buggy implementations elsewhere, but also to avoid inflating BGP messages. As BGP updates propagate, the AS paths (the 16- and 32-bit versions) increase in length, so an update that was just under the limit at some point will exceed the maximum size of 4096 bytes at some point, and then definitely bad things will happen.

However, it's important that new transitive attributes aren't filtered out wholesale, as that would make it impossible to add new features to BGP. I'm not sure if there is a workable way to put a stop to frivolous BGP path attributes being injected into the global routing system while at the same time not robbing BGP of its forward compatibility with future new innovations.

Permalink - posted 2023-10-02

Myhthbusters

▼ 20 years ago today, the TV show Mythbusters aired its first regular episode on the Discovery Channel, after three earlier pilot episodes. And soon after, I had found a new favorite TV show.

What Mythbusters did between 2003 and 2016 was investigate whether (urban) myths, viral videos, movie stunts and idioms had some truth to them or not. The usual outcomes were: confirmed (results replicated without issue), plausible (results replicated but possibly some liberties taken) and busted (results could not be reasonably duplicated). If a myth was busted, they would often see what it took to replicate the results, going to extremes as needed.

I think the first episode I saw was "penny drop". That was the seventh episode, with the main myth being that a penny (one cent coin) dropped from the Empire State Building would kill you if it hit you down on the street. The big question here was how fast a penny would be traveling after being dropped from the iconic skyscraper.

At this point, we only had the two main hosts, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. Adam had built a rig with a tube with holes in it and air being blown in from the bottom with the airspeed in the tube going down with increasing height from 100 km/h to about 60 km/h. As the pennies stayed in the tube, their terminal velocity must match a speed between those two numbers.

With the always exuberant Adam annoyed by the usually stoic Jamie:

Jamie:

Works for me.

Adam:

This is excited Jamie? This is a world first going out on television that we showed exactly how fast a penny goes. No math, no ideas, no timing off a building, we got it right here in the lab.

Jamie:

It's great. Good job.

Turns out those falling pennies aren't lethal. Adam and Jamie both have one fired at their hand with no damage, and...

Adam:

Come on, shoot me in the ass, come on. I can take it.

The interaction between the hosts was what made Mythbusters so funny.

That dynamic wouldn't change very much over the following almost decade and a half. For most of the run of the show, the "build team" consisting of Grant Imahara, Kari Byron and Tony Belleci would usually bust separate myths, but sometimes the main and secondary hosts would team up.

They really caught lighning in a bottle here. The interactions between the hosts were almost always fun, and as experienced builders with some notion of the scientific method, the Mythbusters weren't completely lost when it came to attacking myths, but they were also not so knowledgeable that they could predict the results very well in advance.

A few more quotes:

Adam:

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Jamie:

I love it when common materials are dangerous.

Narrator Robert Lee:

This thing that looks like a maximum security bird house, is actually the vital fulcrum.

Adam, about to go through a carwash with Jamie on the roof of his car:

As long as we're testing methods for removing unwanted pests from the outside of your car, we couldn't finish this without going through the carwash.

Tory:

It's not the prettiest thing but I think it's going to work.

That’s what they said when they hired me.

Great stuff.

Permalink - posted 2023-09-23

MySQL Unicode weirdness

▼ After looking at the SQLite Unicode behavior, it's now time to do the same for MySQL. Coincidentally, I'm currently migrating some old databases that were created in the very early 2000s to a more modern environment. I think those old databases were from the MySQL 3.x days, before MySQL gained any sort of Unicode support. Those old tables are thus still in the latin1 (ISO 8859-1) character set.

For a long time that worked fine for me as these tables contain data in English and Dutch, and Dutch only needs a few accents, which are all present in Latin 1. However... at some point it started becoming more convenient to use UTF-8 for the text in those databases. So I did. I just never told MySQL about the switch.

In hindsight, that was not a terrible decision, as it avoided complexities at a time when UTF-8 support was still immature. But these days, there's really no excuse to do anything other than make an entire workflow UTF-8 clean, barring any showstoppers.

So I migrated an old table to the test environment for the new system. And got some really weird results: on web pages "CO₂" showed up as "COâ‚‚", but in MySQL it showed up correct, be it that the number of characters is off (I only got 6 while I specified 8):

mysql> select substr(article, 1587, 8) from muart where id = 753;

+--------------------------+
| substr(article, 1587, 8) |
+--------------------------+
| CO₂ ui                 |
+--------------------------+

Further digging by looking at the raw data:

mysql> select hex(substr(article, 1587, 8)) from muart where id = 753;

+-------------------------------+
| hex(substr(article, 1587, 8)) |
+-------------------------------+
| 434FC3A2E2809AE2809A207569    |
+-------------------------------+

Fortunately, it's not necessary to decode this manually, there is an UTF-8 Decoder web tool for that. The decoder shows that COâ‚‚ is correct. So why is MySQL showing me CO₂? That's a problem I hadn't heard of before, but is apparently not uncommon:

Double-encoded UTF-8.

This happens when you take UTF-8, such as "CO₂", and then pretend it's another encoding (usually Latin 1) and convert that to UTF-8. So what had happened is that as I was importing my data in MySQL, the MySQL command line client would send UTF-8 to the MySQL server process, but the server would think that was Latin 1 and convert it to UTF-8. Then when I did a query, the server would convert the UTF-8 back to what it thought was Latin 1 for the convenience of the client, and the client then showed this as UTF-8 so everything looked good, but was actually stored in the database incorrectly.

Fortunately, the two related problems were both easy enough to fix. First, make sure the client and server agree on the character encoding. Let's first check what the server's original settings are:

mysql> SHOW SESSION VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                          |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | latin1                         |
| character_set_connection | latin1                         |
| character_set_database   | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                         |
| character_set_results    | latin1                         |
| character_set_server     | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_system     | utf8mb3                        |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql-8.0/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+

Wow. But fortunately we don't have to fix all of those individually. We can simply do:

mysql --default_character_set=utf8mb4

And then:

mysql> SHOW SESSION VARIABLES LIKE 'character_set%';

+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                          |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_connection | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_database   | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                         |
| character_set_results    | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_server     | utf8mb4                        |
| character_set_system     | utf8mb3                        |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql-8.0/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------+

Much better.

And convert the double-encoded UTF-8 into something more readable:

mysql> UPDATE muart SET title=CONVERT(CAST(CONVERT(title USING latin1) AS binary) USING utf8mb4);

Keen-eyed observers may have noted that MySQL has two versions of UTF-8: utf8mb3 and utf8mb4. This goes back to the early days of Unicode, where the idea was that all characters would fit into 16 bits. That results in a maximum of 3 bytes of UTF-8. But it soon became clear that 16 bits wasn't enough. So now it's 21 bits. UTF-8 can handle that just fine, but those characters that need 17 - 21 bits result in 4-byte UTF-8 sequences. So when dealing with MySQL, when you think "UTF-8", type "utf8mb4".

Permalink - posted 2023-09-21

Should the datacenter be in the middle?

▼ The other day, I landed on this article: In Focus: Subsea Network Architecture: IXPs. The article takes some time to arrive at the point that undersea internet exchanges would be a good idea. The most eyecatching part is a variation on this image:

As the article starts out discussing how datacenters have been moving away from large cities to take advantage of opportunities such as space, cheap energy and easier cooling, this image seems to suggest that these blue dots in are good locations for datacenters and/or internet exchanges in general. And that's definitely not the point of the paper that the image is from.

That paper is very specifically about the best locations to place servers for high speed algorithmic trading on multiple markets some distance away from each other. This immediately explains why there is nothing around the western US: there are simply no stock exchanges / markets there (the red dots in the image).

The math looks more complicated, but presumably, in these cases it helps when the servers executing the trading algorithms are in the middle between the "users", rather than close to one and further from the other(s).

If you need data from two places far away from each other, then it's better when each is 25 milliseconds away, as you can then complete your action in 25 ms plus however long it takes to do your own processing. If you're close to one so it's 0 ms for one data source and 50 ms for the other, then the entire action takes at least 50 ms.

But is that a common situation?

In general, you can just copy the data beforehand. So this only applies if you're using "live" data from two or more locations. Videoconferencing with a number of participants could be an example, where a server receives the video from all the participants, mixes it into a single feed and then sends that single feed out to all the participants. If the server is in the middle, this limits the maximum delay. I guess that could be somewhat helpful. But to the degree that it makes sense to have datacenters in the middle of the ocean? I'm not convinced.

Permalink - posted 2023-09-07