Home » Cdn: what they are and why they are essential for the Internet

Cdn: what they are and why they are essential for the Internet

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If the streaming on Netflix or that of the football match goes smoothly and does not stop, much of the credit goes to the CDs. Even if we don’t know. After the incident that took place at Cdn Fastly, however, it is easier to recognize the importance of these networks.

What are the Cdn
The Cdn (Content delivery network), in Italian Content delivery networks, are in fact the invisible backbone of the Internet. As the name implies, they are a network of servers for delivering content to users, individuals or companies. They make this happen in the fastest and least problematic way possible.

They now manage most of the online traffic, especially what has to do with videos and images, and therefore every day we deal with them: on social mean, your YouTube, even reading a news site.

The alarm

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Why are CDNs needed
CDNs are used to solve a problem known as latency, the delay between when we request online content (for example, by clicking on a web page) and the moment that content appears in front of us. A major cause of the delay is the physical distance between us and the server hosting that content: the mission of a CDN is to virtually shorten that physical distance.

How a Cdn works
To minimize the distance, a Cdn has servers distributed geographically around the world, where it stores a version of that content in multiple places (also called points of presence): each Pop contains a certain number of storage (i.e. caching) servers responsible for delivering the content to the closest users.

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Basically, the Cdn puts the content in many places at the same time. Not only that: it also improves performance through various techniques (such as file minimization and compression), while others serve to increase the reliability of delivery. A good CDN is redundant and has load balancing systems, to overcome connection failures and spikes and also has protection systems against Ddos attacks, those with whom criminal groups can target a website or internet service, bombarding it with a large amount of traffic in order to block it.

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The cybersecurity of the Cdn
But if CDNs are so important that if they go down half the internet falls, aren’t we running the risk of a global blackout? “The CDNs are generally very safe in themselves and serve to increase the security of the Internet. Incidents like the one in Fastly are very rare – he explained Giorgio Sbaraglia, security expert at the Clusit association – We also take into account that Fastly is a big Cdn but it is much smaller than the main world Cdn, such as Akamai and Cloudfare “. Akamai, for example, has nearly 10 times the turnover of Fastly and handles 30% of world traffic: “A bigger CD could better handle any problems, such as those that happened to Fastly.”

However, the threats to the stability of a CDN (and the services connected to it) are not only technical failures and errors, but also cyber attacks: “In theory it is possible to attack a Cdn that is badly configured, but there are no striking cases to date”, Sbaraglia specified.

In 2019 it emerged a specific attack, called CpDos, which could force the CDN not to offer the requested content and return an error page. But it was a theoretical attack, based on a vulnerability discovered by some researchers (Hoai Viet Nguyen, Luigi Lo Iacono and Hannes Federrath) and at the time companies rushed to correct the vulnerability in question.

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