India's ISPs show they have good MANRS, sign up to Internet Society's routing security scheme

India's ISPs have agreed as a bloc to join The Internet Society's MANRS route integrity programme.

MANRS stands for Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, and was launched in 2014 to try and solve some of the Border Gateway Protocol's most pressing problems. In essence, the programme asks its members to play their part in stopping people accidentally or deliberately "black-holing" traffic with dodgy route advertisements.

Since creating the programme, The Internet Society (ISOC) has faced the uphill battle of pitching the initiative to network operators, so an agreement with the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) is a big step forward for MANRS.

In its announcement, ISOC described its memorandum of understanding with ISPAI, signed by Rajnesh Singh of ISOC and ISPAI president Rajesh Chharia, as "a step towards taking immediate action to improve the resilience and security of the routing infrastructure in India".

The four pillars of MANRS are that providers filter route advertisements to catch configuration errors; block traffic with spoofed IP addresses (often used to try and conceal DDoS attacks); coordinate their communications so if a bad BGP advertisement gets through it's stopped quickly; and publish routing data to make it easier to validate each others' information.

Singh told the Economic Times he believed MANRS also deserves to be incorporated into the academic curriculum, so "when the youth join the workforce, they will know what measures to take and would not be vulnerable to internet threats".

In July, academic networks in Europe (GEANT) and Australia (AARNet) signed on with the MANRS programme. ®