BGP, the current inter-domain routing protocol, assumes that the routing information propagated by authenticated routers is correct. This assumption renders the current infrastructure vulnerable to both accidental misconfigurations and deliberate attacks. To reduce this vulnerability, we present a combination of two mechanisms: Listen and Whisper. Listen passively probes the data plane and checks whether the underlying routes to different destinations work. Whisper uses cryptographic functions along with routing redundancy to detect bogus route advertisements in the control plane. These mechanisms are easily deployable, and do not rely on either a public key infrastructure or a central authority like ICANN.

Abstract — The Internet’s interdomain routing protocol, BGP, is vulnerable to a number of damaging attacks, which often arise from operator misconfiguration. Proposed solutions with strong guarantees require a public-key infrastructure, accurate routing registries, and changes to BGP. While experts debate whether such a large deployment is feasible, networks remain vulnerable to false information injected into BGP. However, BGP routers could avoid selecting and propagating these routes if they were cautious about adopting new reachability information. We describe a protocol-preserving enhancement to BGP, Pretty Good BGP (PGBGP), that slows the dissemination of bogus routes, providing network operators time to respond before problems escalate into a large-scale Internet attack. Simulation results show that realistic deployments of PGBGP could provide 99% of Autonomous Systems with 24 hours to investigate and repair bogus routes without affecting prefix reachability. We also show that without PGBGP, 40 % of ASs cannot avoid selecting bogus routes; with PGBGP, this number drops to less than 1%. Finally, we show that PGBGP is incrementally deployable and offers significant security benefits to early adopters and their customers. I.

This note attempts to raise awareness within the network research community about the security of the interdomain routing infrastructure. We identify several attack objectives and mechanisms, assuming that one or more BGP routers have been compromised. Then, we review the existing and proposed countermeasures, showing that they are either generally ineffective (route filtering), or probably too heavyweight to deploy (S-BGP). We also review several recent proposals, and conclude by arguing that a significant research effort is urgently needed in the area of routing security.

We present novel and practical techniques to accurately detect IP prefix hijacking attacks in real time to facilitate mitigation. Attacks may hijack victim’s address space to disrupt network services or perpetrate malicious activities such as spamming and DoS attacks without disclosing identity. We propose novel ways to significantly improve the detection accuracy by combining analysis of passively collected BGP routing updates with data plane fingerprints of suspicious prefixes. The key insight is to use data plane information in the form of edge network fingerprinting to disambiguate suspect IP hijacking incidences based on routing anomaly detection. Conflicts in data plane fingerprints provide much more definitive evidence of successful IP prefix hijacking. Utilizing multiple real-time BGP feeds, we demonstrate the ability of our system to distinguish between legitimate routing changes and actual attacks. Strong correlation with addresses that originate spam emails from a spam honeypot confirms the accuracy of our techniques.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an IETF standard inter-domain routing protocol on the Internet. However, it is well known that BGP is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, and that a single misconfigured or malicious BGP speaker could result in large scale service disruption. We first summarize a set of security goals for BGP, and then propose Pretty Secure BGP (ps-BGP) as a new security protocol achieving these goals. psBGP makes use of a centralized trust model for authenticating Autonomous System (AS) numbers, and a decentralized trust model for verifying the propriety of IP prefix origination. We compare psBGP with S-BGP and soBGP, the two leading security proposals for BGP. We believe psBGP trades off the strong security guarantees of S-BGP for presumed-simpler operations, while requiring a different endorsement model: each AS must select a small number (e.g., one or two) of its peers from which to obtain endorsement of its prefix ownership assertions. This work contributes to the ongoing exploration of tradeoffs and balance between security guarantee, operational simplicity, and policies acceptable to the operator community. 1.

The security of the Internet’s interdomain routing system hinges on whether autonomous systems (ASes) can trust the information they receive from each other via the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Frequently, this trust has been misguided, resulting in wide-spread outages and significant concerns about future attacks. Despite the seriousness of these problems, proposals for a more secure version of BGP have been stymied by serious impediments to practical deployment. Instead, we argue that the existing trust relationships between network operators (and the institutions they represent) are a powerful force for improving the security of BGP, without changing the underlying routing protocol. Our approach leverages ideas from online reputation systems to allow ASes to form a peer-to-peer overlay that integrates results from local network-management tools for detecting attacks and configuration errors. The proposed architecture is incrementally deployable, protects against shilling attacks, and deters malicious operator behavior. 1.

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Network measurement has shown that a specific IP address prefix may be announced by more than one autonomous system (AS), a phenomenon commonly referred to as Multiple Origin AS, or MOAS. MOAS can be due to either operational need to support multi-homing, or false route announcements due to configuration or implementation errors, or even by intentional attacks. Packets following such bogus routes will be either dropped or, in the case of an intentional attack, delivered to a machine of the attacker’s choosing. This paper presents a protocol enhancement to BGP which enables BGP to detect bogus route announcements from false origins. Rather than imposing cryptographybased authentication and encryption to secure routing message exchanges, our solution makes use of the rich connectivity among ASes that exists in the Internet. Simulation results show that this simple solution can effectively detect false routing announcements even in the presence of multiple compromised routers, become more robust in larger topologies, and can substantially reduce the impact of false routing announcements even with a partial deployment. 1

The vast expansion of interconnectivity with the Internet and the rapid evolution of highly-capable but largely insecure mobile devices threatens cellular networks. In this paper, we characterize the impact of the large scale compromise and coordination of mobile phones in attacks against the core of these networks. Through a combination of measurement, simulation and analysis, we demonstrate the ability of a botnet composed of as few as 11,750 compromised mobile phones to degrade service to area-code sized regions by 93%. As such attacks are accomplished through the execution of network service requests and not a constant stream of phone calls, users are unlikely to be aware of their occurrence. We then investigate a number of significant network bottlenecks, their impact on the density of compromised nodes per base station and how they can be avoided. We conclude by discussing a number of countermeasures that may help to partially mitigate the threats posed by such attacks. 1.

This paper presents a scalable mechanism, Fast Routing Table Recovery (FRTR), for detecting and correcting route inconsistencies between neighboring BGP routers. The large size of today’s global routing table makes the conventional periodic update approach, used by most routing protocols, infeasible. FRTR lets neighboring routers periodically exchange Bloom filter digests of their routing state. The digest exchanges not only enable the detection of potential inconsistencies during normal operations, but also speed up recovery after a BGP session reset. FRTR achieves low bandwidth overhead by using small digests, and it achieves strong consistency by “salting ” the digests with random seeds to remove false-positives. Our analysis and simulation results show that, with one round of message exchanges, FRTR can detect and recover over 91% of random errors that the current BGP would have missed with an overhead as low as 1.3 % of a full routing table exchange. With salted digests FRTR can detect and recover all the errors with a probability close to 100 % after a few rounds of message exchanges. 1.