Fergie's Tech Blog

Renesys: Tracking a Plane Flight via BGP Updates

Wow -- this is a fascinating article. By the way -- great job, Todd.

Todd Underwood writes over on the Renesys blog:

I just saw my plane cross the mid-Atlantic, not by looking out the window, but by watching routing updates cascade across the Internet. I'm writing from a Lufthansa jet right now, travelling from Munich to Boston. This plane offers the (relatively) new Connexion by Boeing wifi + satellite Internet service. It's seriously cool stuff - high latency, but absolutely functional. I've been aware of it for a while since the Boeing folks did a NANOG presentation about it last year. But this is the first time I've been able to use it.

Renesys has been tracking Internet updates for a very long time. We set realtime routing alerts to tell us when changes in the Internet's structure are a violation of someone's routing or security policy. We have known that due to satellite connectivity, the Internet routing tables could be used for tracking aircraft and the like. But this is the first time I've been on an Internet-connected vehicle, travelling 950kph, that changed its connection to the Internet. If this interconnection architecture is used by others, this could signal the rise of all kinds of interesting uses of the global Internet for monitoring.

I was able to see the mid-Atlantic shift because the plane I'm on withdrew its routes from the European communications satellites and re-announced them in North America. The Boeing engineers faced some interesting challenges in designing this system. They wanted a wifi-delivered platform that was easy to use. They also wanted fully-functional connectivity. They were targetting business customers so simple web connectivity was not enough: customers would want VPNs, ssh and all manner of connections to corporate applications. And finally, if this service was going to work properly, it would have to be as low-latency as possible, not just high bandwidth.

Much more here.

posted by Fergie @ 5/11/2006 08:43:00 AM