Global BGP Attacks that Evade Route Monitoring

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Birge-Lee, Henry, Apostolaki, Maria, Rexford, Jennifer
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Birge-Lee, Henry
Apostolaki, Maria
Rexford, Jennifer
author_facet Birge-Lee, Henry
Apostolaki, Maria
Rexford, Jennifer
contents As the deployment of comprehensive Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) security measures is still in progress, BGP monitoring continues to play a critical role in protecting the Internet from routing attacks. Fundamentally, monitoring involves observing BGP feeds to detect suspicious announcements and taking defensive action. However, BGP monitoring relies on seeing the malicious BGP announcement in the first place! In this paper, we develop a novel attack that can hide itself from all state-of-the-art BGP monitoring systems we tested while affecting the entire Internet. The attack involves launching a sub-prefix hijack with the RFC-specified NO_EXPORT community attached to prevent networks with the malicious route installed from sending the route to BGP monitoring systems. We study the viability of this attack at four tier-1 networks and find all networks we studied were vulnerable to the attack. Finally, we propose a mitigation that significantly improves the robustness of the BGP monitoring ecosystem. Our paper aims to raise awareness of this issue and offer guidance to providers to protect against such attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09622
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Global BGP Attacks that Evade Route Monitoring
Birge-Lee, Henry
Apostolaki, Maria
Rexford, Jennifer
Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
As the deployment of comprehensive Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) security measures is still in progress, BGP monitoring continues to play a critical role in protecting the Internet from routing attacks. Fundamentally, monitoring involves observing BGP feeds to detect suspicious announcements and taking defensive action. However, BGP monitoring relies on seeing the malicious BGP announcement in the first place! In this paper, we develop a novel attack that can hide itself from all state-of-the-art BGP monitoring systems we tested while affecting the entire Internet. The attack involves launching a sub-prefix hijack with the RFC-specified NO_EXPORT community attached to prevent networks with the malicious route installed from sending the route to BGP monitoring systems. We study the viability of this attack at four tier-1 networks and find all networks we studied were vulnerable to the attack. Finally, we propose a mitigation that significantly improves the robustness of the BGP monitoring ecosystem. Our paper aims to raise awareness of this issue and offer guidance to providers to protect against such attacks.
title Global BGP Attacks that Evade Route Monitoring
topic Cryptography and Security
Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09622