3rd International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks

Research Article

Detecting Bogus BGP Route Information: Going Beyond Prefix Hijacking

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/SECCOM.2007.4550358,
        author={Jian Qiu and Lixin Gao and Supranamaya Ranjan and Antonio Nucci},
        title={Detecting Bogus BGP Route Information: Going Beyond Prefix Hijacking},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={SECURECOMM},
        year={2008},
        month={6},
        keywords={Assembly  Gain control  Internet  Object detection  Peer to peer computing  Protection  Real time systems  Routing protocols  Topology  Traffic control},
        doi={10.1109/SECCOM.2007.4550358}
    }
    
  • Jian Qiu
    Lixin Gao
    Supranamaya Ranjan
    Antonio Nucci
    Year: 2008
    Detecting Bogus BGP Route Information: Going Beyond Prefix Hijacking
    SECURECOMM
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/SECCOM.2007.4550358
Jian Qiu1,*, Lixin Gao1,*, Supranamaya Ranjan2,*, Antonio Nucci2,*
  • 1: Department of ECE, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003
  • 2: Narus, Inc. 500 Logue Avenue, Mountain View, CA 94043
*Contact email: jqiu@ecs.umass.edu, lgao@ecs.umass.edu, soups@narus.com, anucci@narus.com

Abstract

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol of the Internet. However, the BGP system has been built based on the implicit trust among individual administrative domains and no countermeasure prevents bogus routes from being injected and propagated through the system. Attackers might exploit bogus routes to gain control of arbitrary address spaces (i.e. prefixes), to either hijack the relevant traffic or launch stealthy attacks. Attackers can directly originate the bogus routes of the prefixes, or even stealthier, further spoof the AS paths of the routes to make them appear to be originated by others. We propose a real-time detection system for ISPs to provide protection against bogus routes. The system learns from the historical BGP routing data the basic routing information objects that assemble BGP routes, and detect the suspicious routes comprised of unseen objects. In particular, we leverage a directed AS-link topology model to detect path spoofing routes that violate import/export routing policies. Moreover, we explore various heuristics to infer the potentially legitimate routing information objects to reduce false alarms. The experiments based on several documented incidents show that our system can yield a nearly 100% detection rate while bounding the false positive rate to as low as 0.02%.