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[Music]
hello everybody Welcome to the last talk
in in this block who of you sent your
stuff to the camp with
bgp any user of bgp I used it it works
great this is the routing protocol at
camp for Parcels but there's another bgp
which is the routing protocol on the
internet for packets it's what has
enabled the internet for decades
bentor is going to tell us about what
might replace bgp on the internet and
what and how s might actually help to
make the internet Greener Mentor stage
is all yours thank
you all right so um in the next 20
minutes or so um I will talk about how
the internet actually works currently um
what the San project in particular wants
to change about it and how that works uh
I will gloss over a lot of the technical
detail unfortunately because I have very
little time um and I try to be inclusive
in this talk and um which is why I will
use metaphors that um might stretch uh
reality a bit um I simply want to uh
give you those of you who have no idea
uh actually how the internet works um
some idea of how it does um and for this
reason please bear with me if you have
an idea what I'm talking about and the
analogy doesn't quite
fit all right so this is the outline of
my
talk first uh we need to talk about how
the internet currently
works the status quo is that the
internet pretty much works like a
run-of-the-mill poster system uh
say I want to send this plush owl to the
chaos Computer Club in
Berlin so what do I do I simply put it
in the box and add a sticker to that box
with a destination U where I write the
postal address of the Kos Community Club
burden give it to the nice uh Folks at
the
bgp um at
the I think they're called the camp
passle service or something um and then
they worry about the
rest I don't actually
know the route which this packet will
take I only know that at some uh point
in the future I think a few days or so
if um everything works as expected my uh
owl will arrive safely at chaos Computer
Club
berin
so I don't know whether this um packet
will be forwarded or package will be
forwarded bya Sanic or by a first and
back maybe it can also take a detour
through a logistics Center in frankfur
Oda I don't I simply don't
know
interesting I guess think I need to
restart my
slides because I just rebuilt them
a short timeout
please here we
[Music]
go
all
right so this is the perspective of the
user that sends a packet over the
current Internet they simply know where
to um put the packet um the next postal
office and something some magic happens
in between and the packet arrives at um
at its destination at some
point how does the postal system do do
this well in very simple terms and this
is not unfortunately not exactly how it
works uh unfortunately let's assume that
there's a post office in every town and
each has a few Courier connections to
the surrounding post office in
neighboring towns and each post office
also keeps a huge list of all the towns
in the country where it can look up um
into which neighboring post office it
should send a packet in order for the
packet to move closer to its
destination so
um we send a parcel uh this parcel will
get
forwarded uh
interativos to its destination until at
some point it arrives in its destination
city where the postman knows exactly how
to find uh the street address for this
packet so this distributed mechanism
this is pretty simp similar of how um
poster systems used to work uh in the
past for several hundreds of years and
works very well the a given post office
only needs to know in which W Direction
uh it needs to forward this packet and
at some point the packet will arrive
actually in the city where it is
intended to um arrive
in so and there it will be given to a
post man or woman or person
and uh who will know where how to uh
deliver this
packet
so resolving this analogy the post
office um are the internet core routers
the post offices the local post office
um is your ISP which is uh where you
will give send your letters or give up
your letters and receive new letters um
and this PO all post office along the
way are their own networks their own
autonomous system systems you have
probably heard this term already and
all the neighboring post office of a
given post office are called its
peers and this huge list that each post
office needs to maintain uh in order to
know uh along which Next Top uh a given
packet needs to be sent is a routing
table and the bgp protocol not those
guys over there but the bgp protocol is
used to keep the routing table up to
date so what is wrong with this current
Internet well depending on your
perspective not that much or maybe quite
a lot so um the internet has doesn't
have the best reliability so it has like
three NES uh has a 99.9% reliability
which sounds a lot but actually isn't
that that much the good news about the
internet however is that uh fers often
last a few seconds which you all of you
have probably noticed that we doesn't
load you hit F5 and it does load and you
don't know where the problem was but
it's pretty likely that the problem was
with this bgp mechanism where failure
wasn't needed to be resolved um in order
for routing to work again there are
other problems like security problems
because bgp as a protocol was designed
uh at a time where there was an an
implicit assumption that every
participant on the network can be
trusted um actually in the vgp IC in
ic's in the first ones uh the words
trust or security or malicious or attack
or something you can grab for this and
zero hits every time the bgp was
designed with a completely different
internet in mind than we have
today then there are some broken
economic incentives so as we all know um
currently legislation or politics is
lagging behind uh and don't really They
Don't Really uh enforce um a proper
carbon tax um on uh carbon emissions
which means that it's still the case
today that uh you C you can buy
electricity from non-renewable energy at
lower prices than electricity that was
created using renewable energy and
obviously Market forces Force Network
operators which have running costs and
need this energy um force them to U
basically just buy the cheapest one by
buy the discount to electricity and this
is obviously a problem this is one of
the points where the internet is
currently not as green as it could be
but it's also hard for users to
influence like you don't really have a
choice uh when some Network in between
decides to buy uh electricity from coal
plants um yeah you're basically stuck
with
this now what is different with scon a
lot of things they are doing trying to
to address a lot of these uh problems
for instance also addressing um security
uh aspects but I won't go into detail
here the key point where C differs from
the bgp based internet is that in with C
the senders get to decide along which
paths the data gets
forwarded so again in our postal analogy
what we do instead of writing a regular
street address there we write steps
there we say okay okay um the first step
is the camp passle service the packet
needs to go there before the camp passle
service forwards it to milor before
milor forwards it to San Nick and so on
and at some point it arrives at a point
where a post person a post man or
postwoman can simply read the street
address and exactly knows where it is so
this is the the postal analogy
um how does this
help how um like translating this to
data packets how what do we
gain we gain as users the ability to uh
boycott networks that that we know
operate under dubious with a dubious
sustainability track and we track and we
can also um support networks that we
know operate sustainably that have uh
basically given assurances to other
parties that they are only buying like
energy from renewable
sources and in this in our example when
we want to send this owl to Berlin um
and we know that the operator of the
connection between sedik and oranburg
which is on the way to Berlin uh uses a
truck um and we also know that operator
that sends um traffic or packets or
Parcels between first and back uses rail
then I can as a user decide please route
my packet
along first andb even if it takes a bit
longer um but I I know that the carbon
footprint of this transaction will be uh
smaller there's an additional feature um
of course that I should should mention
this allows all sorts of things to do
with this um this capability for
instance for activists it's also
interesting maybe to avoid routing via
networks that are under dubious
jurisdictions ET so there's uh you can
optimize for for for more
things it's also interesting uh that c
is has been designed in a way that
allows it to operate allows its core
outer to operate more efficiently it
doesn't in the post office anology it
doesn't really keep these long lists uh
um with which it needs to decide where
to send on which packet and doesn't need
to keep this this list of all the towns
in the in the country uh it simply needs
to follow the instructions that are
written on the
parcel this comes at the expense however
of uh 5 to 20% of bandwidth overhead
which sounds like a lot is it's not
strictly an issue uh in wired
communication because wir communication
speeds don't really uh increasing the
speed doesn't really scale the
electricity uh need of this if you just
you just put a new laser with a
different wavelength on the same fiber
and the the laser doesn't really need
more energy in order to transport more
data um but to basically visualize this
overhead that um this uh introduces
imagine putting this owl into a parcel
where you write like I don't know the uh
bgp guys over there um onto it and then
put it into another parcel and write the
next address actually it's the other way
around first you would write the address
of Berlin put it into an X parcel which
you close and then you write um oranim
Bor there and then put it in a parcel
and then you write I don't know uh what
did I
say first back uh on it put it in a
parcel and then on the last pass you
write um bgp and then uh they know they
they unwrap it and so on this is
obviously inquis some overhead and this
is like a simply a visualization of what
kind of overhead it uh entails it in the
technical details are a bit different
but uh this is how it
works also there's something that we
should should mention is there's an
embodied CO2 footprint um because cion
router Hardware is different from s
Hardware that from Hardware that that
needs to run the regular internet um and
obviously rolling out c u globally would
mean investing this uh embodying this
CO2 footprint of um in t in con
constructing all this Hardware um action
numbers um how bad this will be are
missing I don't know about this um I
think a rough wallpark is that a scon
router will be about ody about as much
energy as an equivalent IP internet
router so maybe this sort of uh evens
out but you could feel free to research
this
yourself um a third point which is
actively U being discussed in the s
project is to attach um carbon footprint
of each each individual hop uh as
metadata uh to this routing information
um that then allows the user to
construct paths that use the minimal
amount of CO2 and then let the user
preferences uh cause pressure on network
operators uh to use renewable energy or
to prefer the use of renewable energy um
another aspect of this would be that if
they are being honest about their
current CO2 CO2 um like uh uh emissions
used for uh routing their packets and
this changes dynamically basically uh
for example based on available wind um
then using this information could cause
or could help us route our packets
around I don't know like uh how is it
called if the wind is wind is gone uh
around calm weather patches um where
there's um little uh little wind too
little wind power for the uh wind
turbines and so we simply avoid these
regions and send our packets by
different
routes um all in all this could could
could sort of create a virtuous circle
where um the network operators try to
compete with with each other and try to
be more green than their competitors uh
basically reducing carbon emissions
overall will this be enough will this
really help us fighting climate change
uh well so the global internet energy
consumption in 20 uh 20 was uh 27
terawatt hours uh which is sort of uh
equates to a momentary power uh
consumption of about 31 gaw which is
double that of the biggest uh
hydroelectric plant in the world uh the
three three gorgeous Dam in China
produces about half this amount of power
um if it running if it's running at full
capacity
um and this is excluding um the power
consumption of uh data centers so this
is only Network equipment it's a rough
wallpark figure and this is this number
is expected to grow to about um so right
right now it's 1% of all the global
electricity and this number is expected
to grow to 10% by
2030 so the bottom line is we don't
really know um uh how much uh cion will
help we know that taking all the
efficiency gains of routers into account
and sub subtracting the a bandwidth
overhead that uh it has um we end up uh
at a number of around
10% um more efficient uh or 10% less
electricity use let's
say um of course we didn't really uh
yeah take into account the embodied
carbon costs um and we also didn't
really take into account the currently
still elevated overhead um Energy
overhead that is required for end
devises to actually talk this
protocol um maybe you can
help so it probably wouldn't be enough
to save the planet by itself right um
but uh it's
one uh step along the way and uh we
can't really afford to exclude things
that uh don't promise that much reward
um but we can uh probably use this as an
argument to still push towards a
technology that use that changes the way
that the internet is currently used and
at the same time empowers users um in a
way that uh allows them allows
additional forces to push towards carbon
neutrality and this talk I have left out
a bunch of stuff uh which we could talk
about offline afterwards um of course
there's uh a lot of technical detail
that I glossed over um pretty much uh
there are questions about how like a San
internet would be governed um there are
also different incentives for different
internet stakeholders your ISP might not
be that happy if you always decide to
send your traffic a certain way because
right now it's them who decide how to
forward
it
anyway um how to get involved uh so uh
the s project itself has been under
development at ET zc since 2009 um it's
open source and sanitization underway at
ITF also it's deployed in the wild um
the Swiss secure Finance network is uh
will migrate exclusively to science or
the Swiss banks um will stop using their
old system and exclusively migrate to
this system uh by
2024 um there's uh there are additional
networks so one is um a production
Network that is run by a commercial
company um that is selling this Hardware
also um and an education and uh research
Network um that you guys can join and
also there's um um there's an
experimental playground where you can
play around with with this technology
but it still uses like the regular bgp
based internet underneath and works via
VPN
links um you can play around with this
um under the your Els um and get
involved uh probably um it's probably
best if you join this Matrix Channel
where s development is
discussed um and I think with that I'm
about done you can also reach out to me
at uh this email or this masteron
address