XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

The news about the first step for protection of Russian information sovereignty was absolutely unnoticed by the general public. The Ministry of Communications and Roskomnadzor supported the bill about the Runet management reform. Here is the quote of the adviser to the president of Russia, German Klimenko: "In the law we are talking about the protection of critical infrastructure, which should be located in the territory of Russia. For example, hackers can penetrate the structure of commercial banks and steal money. This is bad, but if they enter into the system of the Central Bank, we would be in big trouble." The west partners of Russia disconnected Crimea from the services of Google and Microsoft. As well as, domain owners, living in the Crimea, have lost what they have gained.

This topic has been raised repeatedly in the Russian Internet community, but each time it faced the misunderstanding of the importance of this question by the part of citizens. Work on the sovereignty internet has been perceived as internet censorship, but it is all about different point. It’s not about the existence and operation of the Internet, but about protection itself in case Russia is cut off from World Wide Web. It is neither a fantasy, nor a joke. Technically, it is very easy to do. Russian segment of the Internet is not independent today. But, it is controlled by the government of USA. The USA Department of Defense developed the Internet Addressing System, but since 1998 year USA Department of Commerce has taken the control of it. Control of internet is under scrutiny of the Congress, which refers it to the strategically important resources of predominance (domination). A national cybersecurity strategy was adopted in the USA last year, which states the principle of maintaining peace by force. Russia «poses a significant cyber influence threat” to the U.S., Dan Coats, director of national intelligence, told Congress last month. Besides disinformation campaigns waged during the 2016 election, Russian state-sponsored hackers have also infiltrated parts of America’s critical national infrastructure». In fact, it means that the legal measures of disconnecting Russia from global network are already being taken, and this is serious, as the technical side is ready as well. The Internet is not just about funny memes and other entertaining content, but in its most significant form it is critical infrastructure for life support systems of enterprises, companies and so on. The bill under discussion will allow to partly reduce risks, and attempts to disconnect , but it does not guarantee full sovereignty. For this Russia will need to create its own infrastructure and switch to its native language in internet addresses, that is exactly what China has already done.

But despite the fact that the law is adopted, foreign companies do not comply with the requirements of the Russian legislation. For example, Google systematically responds to 36 thousand requests from Western security agencies. And zero requests from Russian ones. If Google is blocked in Russia, it will turn into a disaster for the whole country. Citizens will lose access to e - mail, videos on YouTube (the most popular in the world), Google Play app store, Android operating system (will be outlawed and stop working normally) and most common translator, but most importantly they will lose the Google search engine. As an example, in April 2018 Roskomnadzor by a court order started to block the IP-addresses of Telegram messenger, as a result, about 2 million addresses of Google were blocked, which were used for activities of the messenger in Russia. As a result of the locks the following sites did not work or worked intermittently: YouTube, Google Search, Google Services.

The basis for the Internet function is the system of address space and traffic routing. When internet user enters alphabetic site name in the field address, the browser asks the DNS server which digital IP address corresponds to the alphabetic domain name. There are currently 12 organizations who oversee the root servers for DNS, but none of them are based in Russia. But authorities have built a backup of DNS, which they tested in 2014 and again in 2018. They are necessary to speed up the time taken to receive a response to a user request. If the DNS server is located in another country, the response time will be significantly longer, and this will affect the speed of the site loading. In that respect, Russia will try to preserve the work of the address space.

The international Corporation ICANN is responsible for the allocation of the address space. Their non-commercial subsidiary Public Technical Identifiers (PTI), which is registered in the state of California, has been updating records in the DNS registry since August 2016. The state plans to create a register of IP-addresses, which will automatically check their presence in the database of the Dutch company RIPE NCC.

If Russian addresses disappear from that database, the Runet will not function for at least 24 hours. According to the action plan of the program "Digital economy" in 2019 in Russia there will be a system that will replace the root DNS-server. It is necessary to protect all sites operating in the national domain zone from disconnection. Then all DNS updates coming from the international Corporation ICANN will be moderated by Russian servers. The replacement root DNS servers will be located in different regions of the country. Their main goal is to maintain the performance of sites located in the national domain zone, if attempts are made to disrupt their performance.

However, there is another problem. The fact is that the main routing points the Internet traffic are Frankfurt, Stockholm and Amsterdam. Because of this, occasionally a situation arises when 2 Russian operators start transmitting information through a foreign Internet exchange point. So if Russia is disconnected from the global Network, the passage of traffic between providers will be interrupted, which means that many sites will not be available.

Of course, disconnecting Russia from the global network might be possible. But it's more of a theory. For this to happen all the countries at once should cut off Russia from the Internet. This is hardly possible nor plausible. But the country has prepared for the hypothetical possibility of disconnection. The money spent on protecting Russia from disconnection from the global Network will not be wasted. The thing is that the new traffic routing scheme will change approaches to blocking illegal sites. Now filtration is carried out by Internet providers themselves, uploading data from the register of prohibited sites of Roskomnadzor. Because of technical equipment, some regional providers block websites completely, not a specific address. If changes adopted blocking can be done in traffic exchange points,. And extra sites will not be blocked, and bypassing the lock will not be easy.

Somebody took the message of German Klimenko as a signal of the imminent self-exclusion of Russia. However, if you think that Russia wants to isolate itself from the rest of the world it is absurd. The Internet is now an too important part of doing international business and cutting the country off the global network will mean dropping the iron curtain and stopping the flow of foreign investment in this country. Almost all types of business today are dependent on the Internet. So Russia should simply protect itself from potential danger, not isolate itself.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/12/29/russia-could-disconnect-itself-from-global-internet-during-a-crisis-putin-adviser-says/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad9029a286a3

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/59xdmq/why-russia-is-about-to-disconnect-itself-from-the-internet

https://gr-sily.ru/obshestvo/rossiyu-hotyat-otklyuchit-ot-mirovogo-interneta-26581.html

https://brodv.ru/2018/03/07/pochemu-rossiya-gotovitsya-k-otklyucheniyu-interneta/

https://akket.com/raznoe/87375-kogda-v-rossii-otklyuchat-internet-zhiteli-strany-ot-etogo-ne-postradayut.html