Internet infrastructure security: a taxonomy

TLDR

The Internet’s ubiquity and rising cyber‑terrorism threats highlight the urgent need to secure its infrastructure, a focus that has historically lagged behind information‑security research. This work aims to design dependable Internet‑infrastructure architectures, algorithms, and protocols. The authors present a taxonomy of four major attack classes—DNS hacking, routing‑table poisoning, packet mistreatment, and denial‑of‑service—alongside existing countermeasures and a framework for developing secure protocols.

Abstract

The pervasive and ubiquitous nature of the Internet coupled with growing concerns about cyber terrorism demand immediate solutions for securing the Internet infrastructure. So far, the research in Internet security primarily focused on. securing the information rather than securing the infrastructure itself. Given the prevailing threat situation, there is a compelling need to develop architectures, algorithms, and protocols to realize a dependable Internet infrastructure. In order to achieve this goal, the first and foremost step is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the security threats and existing solutions. This article attempts to fulfill this important step by providing a taxonomy of security attacks, which are classified into four main categories: DNS hacking, routing table poisoning, packet mistreatment, and denial-of-service attacks. The article discusses the existing solutions for each of these categories, and also outlines a methodology for developing secure protocols.