Expert: Russian govt wants Runet to be operable if unplugged from global Internet
MOSCOW. Oct 1 (Interfax) - A leading Russian IT expert has argued that Russia's government wants Runet - Russian-language Web domains and sites - to be operable if disconnected from the global Internet.
There are seven levels of communications through the Internet, from the physical level (through radio signals via the Wi-Fi or GSM protocols or by cable) to the application level, a tier where programs communicate with each other and emails are sent, Sergei Golovanov, an anti-virus expert at Kaspersky Lab, told Interfax on Wednesday.
Any country can be disconnected from the global Internet at any of these levels, he said. However, such changes "can't be quick, and any change of this kind in order to isolate a country from the Internet would take from several hours to several days," Golovanov said.
He was commenting on a statement by Russian Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov that Russia is in a position to cope with potential destructive external effects on Runet and will build duplicating national infrastructures.
Nikiforov made the statement after a meeting of the Russian Security Council on Wednesday on perceived threats to Russia's information security.
The owner of the Liveinternet company, German Klimenko, author of some of Russia's Internet services, told Interfax that multiple mutual duplications of infrastructural elements are a feature of the Internet. For example, some such elements are located in the United States but there are copies of them on servers in various countries, including Russia.
"The issue of duplicating elements is the issue of moderation and storage of data about where domain user requests are to be routed. In other words, the minister in effect said that the .ru domain shouldn't depend on this," Klimenko said.
He said that to get to .ru, one in theory needs to go to American servers, but that in practice this is not always the case as the system is duplicated in Russia.
He expressed suspicion that the Communications and Mass Media Ministry plans to launch a data synchronization process to make Russian users independent from U.S. servers.
However, it is a complex process, he argued. "The Internet is primarily a program complex. The plan is that all information about primary posting should be controlled on Russian territory. However, it's not very clear how they're going to achieve this," he said.
