Title
The Hidden Mailman And His Mailbag: Routing Path Analysis From A European Perspective
Abstract
The postal system is often used as an analogy when describing Internet routing. However, in addition to similarities, there are some significant differences. First, and most importantly, the Autonomous Systems (ASes) that operate the routers along the end-to-end path of a packet can often inspect and manipulate the packet and its content. Second, due to lack of secure routing mechanisms, packet paths can be diverted through additional non-trusted ASes. Although we often know the first network we connect through and the service that we access, we seldom know the networks that forward our packets. We can think of these networks as hidden mailmen. To better understand these networks and their potential access to information, we characterize the ASes along the paths of typical Internet packets between European example clients and the most popular web domains. We also identify ASes and countries with higher path coverage and investigate if there are differences in the HTTPS usage among paths that may take additional detours. Our results highlight the role played by North American (typically US-based) ASes and glean insights into how vulnerable the detoured traffic is to man-in-the-middle attacks compared to regular traffic.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
2017 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMMUNICATIONS (ICC)
Information system,Computer security,Computer science,Network packet,Computer network,Path analysis (statistics),Autonomous system (Internet),Analogy,IP forwarding,Information and Computer Science,The Internet
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
1550-3607
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
27
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Josef Gustafsson100.34
Rahul Hiran2282.90
Vengatanathan Krishnamoorthi320.76
Niklas Carlsson458551.31