Title
Network-Destabilizing Attacks
Abstract
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sets up routes between the smaller networks that make up the Internet. Despite its crucial role, BGP is notoriously vulnerable to serious problems, including (1) propagation of bogus routing information due to attacks or misconfigurations, and (2) network instabilities in the form of persistent routing oscillations. The conditions required to avoid BGP instabilities are quite delicate. How, then, can we explain the observed stability of today's Internet in the face of common configuration errors and attacks? This work explains this phenomenon by first noticing that almost every observed attack and misconfiguration to date shares a common characteristic: even when a router announces egregiously bogus information, it will continue to announce the same bogus information for the duration of its attack/misconfiguration. We call these the "fixed-route attacks", and show that, while even simple fixed-route attacks can destabilize a network, the commercial routing policies used in today's Internet prevent such attacks from creating instabilities.
Year
Venue
Field
2012
CoRR
Computer science,Computer security,Computer network,Border Gateway Protocol,Router,The Internet
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1203.1681
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.40
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert Lychev1614.29
Sharon Goldberg239328.23
Michael Schapira3112279.89