Paper Info
Title
Peer Pressure: Exerting Malicious Influence on Routers at a Distance
Abstract
Both academic research and historical incidents have shown that unstable BGP speakers can have extreme, undesirable impacts on network performance and reliability. Large amounts of time and energy have been invested in improving router stability. In this paper, we show how an adversary in control of a BGP speaker in a transit AS can cause a victim router in an arbitrary location on the Internet to become unstable. Through experimentation with both hardware and software routers, we examine the behavior of routers under abnormal conditions and come to three conclusions. First, that unexpected but perfectly legal BGP messages can place routers into those states with troubling ease. Second, that an adversary can implement attacks using these messages to disrupt the function of victim routers in arbitrary locations in the network. And third, modern best practices do not blunt the force of these attacks sufficiently. These conclusions lead us to recommend more rigorous testing of BGP implementations, focusing as much on protocol correctness as on software correctness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/ICDCS.2013.48
Distributed Computing Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Internet,computer network security,peer-to-peer computing,protocols,telecommunication network routing,BGP speakers,border gateway protocol,hardware router,malicious influence,network performance,network reliability,peer pressure,protocol correctness,router stability,software correctness,software router,BGP,Router,Security
Computer science,Computer security,Network security,Correctness,Computer network,Memory management,Adversary,Router,Distributed computing,Network performance,Routing protocol,The Internet
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-6927
2
0.47
References 
Authors
9
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Schuchard, M.120.47
Christopher Thompson220.47
Nicholas Hopper3146995.76
Yongdae Kim420.47