Stealth probing: efficient data-plane security for IP routing

Abstract

IP routing is notoriously vulnerable to accidental misconfiguration and malicious attack. Although secure routing protocols are an important defense, the data plane must be part of any complete solution. Existing proposals for secure (link-level) forwarding are heavy-weight, requiring cryptographic operations at each hop in a path. Instead, we propose a light-weight data-plane mechanism (called stealth probing) that monitors the availability of paths in a secure fashion, while enabling the management plane to home in on the location of adversaries by combining the results of probes from different vantage points (called Byzantine tomography). We illustrate how stealth probing and Byzantine tomography can be applied in today's routing architecture, without requiring support from end hosts or internal routers.