Investigating the Effectiveness of Stealthy Hijacks against Public Route Collectors : Is AS-Path Prepending Enough to Hide from Public Route Collectors?

Sammanfattning: BGP hijacking is a threat to network organizations because traditional BGP protocols were not designed with security in mind. Currently, research to combat hijacking is being done by detecting hijacking in real time from Public Route Collectors. However, by using AS-Path Prepending, a well-known traffic engineering technique, hijackers could adjust the influence scope of hijacks to potentially avoid Public Route Collectors. This thesis investigates fist, whether AS-Path Prepending is sufficient to hide from Public Route Collector, and second whether the hijacker can predict its hijack’s stealthiness by simply comparing the AS path length with the victim. Last, we investigate the non-hijacker-controlled parameters, which are the geographical locations and victim prepending times if the victim also enable AS-Path Prepending for traffic engineering in our study. Our results show that on one hand, AS-Path Prepending benefits stealthy hijacks to route collectors. While on the other hand, it is not sufficient to completely hide from route collectors only using it. By simply comparing the AS paths length, the hijacker’s prediction is constructive but not practical. And non-hijacker-controlled parameters indeed can significantly affect the stealthiness of hijacking.