Project Summary

Recent reports have highlighted incidents of massive Internet traffic interception executed by rerouting BGP paths across the globe (affecting banks, governments, entire network service providers, etc.). The potential impact of these attacks can range from massive eavesdropping to identity spoofing or selective content modification. In addition, executing such attacks does not require access or proximity to the affected links and networks, posing increasing risks to national security. The architectural innovation that mitigates the inherent protocol design flaw exploited by such attacks, is slow to take off, suggesting that this vulnerability will persist, leaving our critical communication infrastructure exposed. Worse yet, the ultimate impact of traffic interception on the Internet is practically unknown, with even large-scale and long-lasting events apparently going unnoticed by the victims.

Devising effective methodologies for the detection and characterization of traffic interception events requires empirical and timely data. Such data must be a combination of passive BGP measurements and active measurements (such as traceroutes), since the mechanism triggering the attack operates on the inter-domain routing control plane, but the actual impact is only verifiable in the data plane. We seek to: (i) investigate, develop, and experimentally evaluate novel methodologies to automatically detect traffic interception events and to characterize their extent, frequency, and impact; (ii) extend our measurement infrastructure to detect in near-realtime and report episodes of traffic interception based on BGP hijacking; (iii) document such events, providing datasets to researchers as well as informing operators, emergency-response teams, law-enforcement agencies, and policy makers. We will quantify increased latency along observed paths, the magnitude of the incident in terms of number of ASes and prefixes intercepted, and the social/political implications of interceptions that take traffic across national borders. To better understand the both technical and political effects of hijacks, we will augment our active measurement framework with algorithmic simulations of BGP routing policies, and qualitative analysis of the organizations involved.

Proposed Timeline of Tasks

The schedule of work below shows how we plan to accomplish the proposed tasks in two years of the project.