2012/05/21 by Marco Chiesa, Chiesa, Marco, Giuseppe Di Battista +5
Computer Science · #C.2.2 #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Cryptography and Data Security #F.2 #FOS: Computer and information sciences #G.2.2 #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #cs.GT #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1205.4564
17 pages with 6 figures
arxiv created 2012/05/21 · openalex publication_date 2012/05/21 · arxiv updated 2012/05/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Harmful Internet hijacking incidents put in evidence how fragile the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is, which is used to exchange routing information between Autonomous Systems (ASes). As proved by recent research contributions, even S-BGP, the secure variant of BGP that is being deployed, is not fully able to blunt traffic attraction attacks. Given a traffic flow between two ASes, we study how difficult it is for a malicious AS to devise a strategy for hijacking or intercepting that flow. We show that this problem marks a sharp difference between BGP and S-BGP. Namely, while it is solvable, under reasonable assumptions, in polynomial time for the type of attacks that are usually performed in BGP, it is NP-hard for S-BGP. Our study has several by-products. E.g., we solve a problem left open in the literature, stating when performing a hijacking in S-BGP is equivalent to performing an interception.