Illuminating Router Vendor Diversity Within Providers and Along Network Paths
Taha Albakour, Oliver Gasser, Robert Beverly, Georgios Smaragdakis · 2023
The Internet architecture has facilitated a multi-party, distributed, and heterogeneous physical infrastructure where routers from different vendors connect and inter-operate via IP. Such vendor heterogeneity can have important security and policy implications. For example, a security vulnerability may be specific to a particular vendor and implementation, and thus will have a disproportionate impact on particular networks and paths if exploited. From a policy perspective, governments are now explicitly banning particular vendors-or have threatened to do so.