2012/03/08 by Robert Lychev, Lychev, Robert, Sharon Goldberg +3
Computer Science · #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Network Security and Intrusion Detection #Network Traffic and Congestion Control #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #cs.DC #cs.NI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1203.1681
14 pages, 1 figure
openalex publication_date 2012/03/08 · arxiv created 2012/08/30 · arxiv updated 2012/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sets up routes between the smaller networks that make up the Internet. Despite its crucial role, BGP is notoriously vulnerable to serious problems, including (1) propagation of bogus routing information due to attacks or misconfigurations, and (2) network instabilities in the form of persistent routing oscillations. The conditions required to avoid BGP instabilities are quite delicate. How, then, can we explain the observed stability of today's Internet in the face of common configuration errors and attacks? This work explains this phenomenon by first noticing that almost every observed attack and misconfiguration to date shares a common characteristic: even when a router announces egregiously bogus information, it will continue to announce the same bogus information for the duration of its attack/misconfiguration. We call these the "fixed-route attacks", and show that, while even simple fixed-route attacks can destabilize a network, the commercial routing policies used in today's Internet prevent such attacks from creating instabilities.