Detection of invalid routing announcement in the Internet

Abstract

Network measurement has shown that a specific IP address prefix may be announced by more than one autonomous system (AS), a phenomenon commonly referred to as Multiple Origin AS, or MOAS. MOAS can be due to either operational need to support multi-homing, or false route announcements due to configuration or implementation errors, or even by intentional attacks. Packets following such bogus routes will be either dropped or in the case of an intentional attack, delivered to a machine of the attacker's choosing. The paper presents a protocol enhancement to BGP which enables BGP to detect bogus route announcements from false origins. Rather than imposing cryptography-based authentication and encryption to secure routing message exchanges, our solution makes use of the rich connectivity among ASs that exists in the Internet. Simulation results show that this simple solution can effectively detect false routing announcements even in the presence of multiple compromised routers, become more robust in larger topologies, and can substantially reduce the impact of false routing announcements even with a partial deployment.