acm sigcomm

There have been many incidents of prefix hijacking in the Internet. The hijacking AS can blackhole the hijacked traffic. Alternatively, it can transparently intercept the hijacked traffic by forwarding it onto the owner. This paper presents a study of such prefix hijacking and interception with the following contributions: (1). We present a methodology for prefix interception, (2). We estimate the fraction of traffic to any prefix that can be hijacked and intercepted in the Internet today, (3).

As more and more Internet IP prefix hijacking incidents are being reported, the value of hijacking detection services has become evident. Most of the current hijacking detection approaches monitor IP prefixes on the control plane and detect inconsistencies in route advertisements and route qualities. We propose a different approach that utilizes information collected mostly from the data plane.

Networks are hard to manage and in spite of all the so called holistic management packages, things are getting worse. We argue that the difficulty of network management can partly be attributed to a fundamental flaw in the existing architecture: protocols expose all their internal details and hence, the complexity of the ever-evolving data plane encumbers the management plane.

We argue that the current model for flow establishment in the Internet: DNS Names, IP addresses, and transport ports, is inadequate due to problems that go beyond the small IPv4 address space and resulting NAT boxes. Even where global addresses exist, firewalls cannot glean enough information about a flow from packet headers, and so often err, typically by being over-conservative: disallowing flows that might otherwise be allowed. This paper presents a novel architecture, protocol design, and implementation, for flow establishment in the Internet.