Global leaders in network equipment Arista, Cisco, Huawei, Juniper, and Nokia joined hands in helping reduce the most common threats to the Internet’s routing system. This is through a groundbreaking Equipment Vendor Program announced as part of the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative, supported by the Internet Society.
“These founding participants are leading by example to improve routing security and hopefully will motivate the entire Internet infrastructure community to make the Internet more secure for everyone,” said Andrei Robachevsky, senior director, technology programs for the Internet Society.
The security of the Internet depends on routing security. Systemic issues that arise from how traffic is routed make the Internet vulnerable to abuse, attacks, and errors. Through technical and collaborative action, MANRS helps networks take crucial steps to decrease route hijacking, route leaks, and IP address spoofing.
The MANRS Equipment Vendor Program provides best practices for all network equipment vendors as they are known to provide business-grade products and services to communication service providers such as fixed or mobile operators, Internet exchange points (IXPs), and enterprise customers. Improving security controls for their products, such as routers and switches, and making them easy to configure enables their customers worldwide to route Internet traffic securely by default.
By joining, vendors agree to the baseline of routing security defined by a set of two actions and a commitment: provide solutions for the implementation of specific MANRS actions by other participants; promote MANRS through training and technical content, and commit to ongoing activities such as advisory, development, contribution, and promotion.
As a founding member, Cisco looks forward to collaborating with the broader community to drive network security innovation. “At Cisco, security is ingrained in everything we do. We believe earning customer trust is about being transparent and accountable as we strive to connect more people and businesses to the Internet securely,” said Kevin Wollenweber, vice president of networking, mass-scale infrastructure group, Cisco.
On the other hand, Huawei is honored to join MANRS as an active contributor to Internet security. “Routing security is crucial to Internet security, and that includes network devices (e.g., routers and IXP switches), the foundation of the Internet. Over the years, Huawei has dedicated itself to building secure and reliable network devices and has extensive capabilities and experience in the field,” said Hank Chen, president of metro router domain of data communication product line, Huawei.
