HIJACKS - Detecting and Characterizing Internet Traffic Interception based on BGP Hijacking

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.

Subtask	Description	Year 1				Year 2				Status
		Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Task 1: Infrastructure for data collection and analysis
1.1	Purchase and deploy storage capacity for databases and historic archives	Q1								done
1.2	Acquire missing databases and integrate them into the system	Q1	Q2							done
1.3	Develop software for the extraction of control-plane metrics and for anomaly detection	Q1								done
1.4	Develop software for targeted active measurements based on Ark's API		Q2							done
1.5	Software integration			Q3	Q4					done
1.6	Reduce latency for detection and diagnosis.					Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	in progress
1.7	Implement additional/refined techniques for anomaly detection, correlation, diagnosis					Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	in progress
1.8	Refinement of software integration						Q2	Q3	Q4	in progress
Task 2: Detection and characterization of interception attacks
2.1	Analysis of related work	Q1								done
2.2	Investigate anomaly indicators for the control-plane	Q1								done
2.3	Study correlation between AS paths inferred from data-plane measurements and AS paths announced on the control plane	Q1								in progress
2.4	Modify CAIDA's AS relationship algorithm to serve as a reference for our inferences		Q2
2.5	Investigate approaches for diagnosis of interception		Q2	Q3	Q4					done
2.6	Investigate approaches for event characterization and quantification of impact			Q3	Q4	Q1				done
2.7	Manually investigate selected events when detected			Q3	Q4					ongoing
2.8	Evaluate update frequency and size of the reference window for databases					Q1				done
2.9	Investigate trade-off of BGP monitoring coverage vs latency of data feed and processing						Q2	Q3		done
2.10	Refine approaches for diagnosis of interception						Q2	Q3		in progress
2.11	Refine approaches for event characterization and quantification of impact							Q3	Q4	in progress
Task 3: Communication and Dissemination of Results
3.1	Write a technical report about research activities				Q4					done
3.2	Invite selected researchers and operators to evaluate our approach and results				Q4					in progress
3.3	Organize the workshop				Q4	Q1				done
3.4	Publish the workshop report and recommendations						Q2			done
3.5	Provide datasets of our results to the scientific community						Q2	Q3	Q4	in progress
3.6	Provide real-time access to the output of our platform to collaborators, vetted researchers, and operators						Q2	Q3	Q4
3.7	Submit scientific papers and present at major workshops and conferences					Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
3.8	Write 2nd technical report about research activities and infrastructure							Q3