Inferring Internet AS Relationships Based on BGP Routing Policies

The type of business relationships between the Internet autonomous systems (AS) determines the BGP inter-domain routing. Previous works on inferring AS relationships relied on the connectivity information between ASes. In this paper we infer AS relationships by analysing the routing polices of ASes encoded in the BGP attributes Communities and the Locpref. We accumulate BGP data from RouteViews, RIPE RIS and the public Route Servers in August 2010 and February 2011. Based on the routing policies extracted from data of the two BGP attributes, we obtain AS relationships for 39% links in our data, which include all links among the Tier-1 ASes and most links between Tier-1 and Tier-2 ASes. We also reveal a number of special AS relationships, namely the hybrid relationship, the partial-transit relationship, the indirect peering relationship and the backup links. These special relationships are relevant to a better understanding of the Internet routing. Our work provides a profound methodological progress for inferring the AS relationships.Comment: 8 pages and 3 figure

BGP and inter-AS economic relationships

The structure of the Internet is still unknown even if it pro- vides well-known services for a large part of the worldwide population. Its current conguration is the result of complex economic interaction developed in the last 20 years among important carriers and ISPs (i.e. ASes). Although with slight success, in the last few years some research work tried to shed light on the economic relationships established among ASes. Typical approaches employed in the above work proceed along two lines: rst, data from BGP monitors spread out all over the world is gath- ered to infer an Internet AS-level topology graph, and second heuristics taking as input this graph are applied to get economic tags associated to all edges between nodes (i.e. ASes). In this paper we propose an in- novative tagging approach leveraging on the lifetime of an AS path to infer the economic relationships on all edges joining the ASes crossed by the path itself, without cutting-o backup links, that bring economic information as well as stable links. The major ndings of our approach can be summarized as follows: (data hygiene before infer the Internet AS-level topology graph) study on AS paths loops, human error and their impact on data correctness ( life-time based tagging we do not cut-o bakcup links) we evidence those tags are inferred only from a partial viewpoint we evidence the maximum lifetime of the AS path that have contributed to infer the tag of each connection { classication of candidate Tier-1 AS based on three indexes re ecting the importance of an AS { explanation and life-time study of non valley-free AS path

Novel architectures and strategies for security offloading

Internet has become an indispensable and powerful tool in our modern society. Its ubiquitousness, pervasiveness and applicability have fostered paradigm changes around many aspects of our lives. This phenomena has positioned the network and its services as fundamental assets over which we rely and trust. However, Internet is far from being perfect. It has considerable security issues and vulnerabilities that jeopardize its main core functionalities with negative impact over its players. Furthermore, these vulnerabilities¿ complexities have been amplified along with the evolution of Internet user mobility. In general, Internet security includes both security for the correct network operation and security for the network users and endpoint devices. The former involves the challenges around the Internet core control and management vulnerabilities, while the latter encompasses security vulnerabilities over end users and endpoint devices. Similarly, Internet mobility poses major security challenges ranging from routing complications, connectivity disruptions and lack of global authentication and authorization. The purpose of this thesis is to present the design of novel architectures and strategies for improving Internet security in a non-disruptive manner. Our novel security proposals follow a protection offloading approach. The motives behind this paradigm target the further enhancement of the security protection while minimizing the intrusiveness and disturbance over the Internet routing protocols, its players and users. To accomplish such level of transparency, the envisioned solutions leverage on well-known technologies, namely, Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization and Fog Computing. From the Internet core building blocks, we focus on the vulnerabilities of two key routing protocols that play a fundamental role in the present and the future of the Internet, i.e., the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Locator-Identifier Split Protocol (LISP). To this purpose, we first investigate current BGP vulnerabilities and countermeasures with emphasis in an unresolved security issue defined as Route Leaks. Therein, we discuss the reasons why different BGP security proposals have failed to be adopted, and the necessity to propose innovative solutions that minimize the impact over the already deployed routing solution. To this end, we propose pragmatic security methodologies to offload the protection with the following advantages: no changes to the BGP protocol, neither dependency on third party information nor on third party security infrastructure, and self-beneficial. Similarly, we research the current LISP vulnerabilities with emphasis on its control plane and mobility support. We leverage its by-design separation of control and data planes to propose an enhanced location-identifier registration process of end point identifiers. This proposal improves the mobility of end users with regards on securing a dynamic traffic steering over the Internet. On the other hand, from the end user and devices perspective we research new paradigms and architectures with the aim of enhancing their protection in a more controllable and consolidated manner. To this end, we propose a new paradigm which shifts the device-centric protection paradigm toward a user-centric protection. Our proposal focus on the decoupling or extending of the security protection from the end devices toward the network edge. It seeks the homogenization of the enforced protection per user independently of the device utilized. We further investigate this paradigm in a mobility user scenario. Similarly, we extend this proposed paradigm to the IoT realm and its intrinsic security challenges. Therein, we propose an alternative to protect both the things, and the services that leverage from them by consolidating the security at the network edge. We validate our proposal by providing experimental results from prof-of-concepts implementations.Internet se ha convertido en una poderosa e indispensable herramienta para nuestra sociedad moderna. Su omnipresencia y aplicabilidad han promovido grandes cambios en diferentes aspectos de nuestras vidas. Este fenómeno ha posicionado a la red y sus servicios como activos fundamentales sobre los que contamos y confiamos. Sin embargo, Internet está lejos de ser perfecto. Tiene considerables problemas de seguridad y vulnerabilidades que ponen en peligro sus principales funcionalidades. Además, las complejidades de estas vulnerabilidades se han ampliado junto con la evolución de la movilidad de usuarios de Internet y su limitado soporte. La seguridad de Internet incluye tanto la seguridad para el correcto funcionamiento de la red como la seguridad para los usuarios y sus dispositivos. El primero implica los desafíos relacionados con las vulnerabilidades de control y gestión de la infraestructura central de Internet, mientras que el segundo abarca las vulnerabilidades de seguridad sobre los usuarios finales y sus dispositivos. Del mismo modo, la movilidad en Internet plantea importantes desafíos de seguridad que van desde las complicaciones de enrutamiento, interrupciones de la conectividad y falta de autenticación y autorización globales. El propósito de esta tesis es presentar el diseño de nuevas arquitecturas y estrategias para mejorar la seguridad de Internet de una manera no perturbadora. Nuestras propuestas de seguridad siguen un enfoque de desacople de la protección. Los motivos detrás de este paradigma apuntan a la mejora adicional de la seguridad mientras que minimizan la intrusividad y la perturbación sobre los protocolos de enrutamiento de Internet, sus actores y usuarios. Para lograr este nivel de transparencia, las soluciones previstas aprovechan nuevas tecnologías, como redes definidas por software (SDN), virtualización de funciones de red (VNF) y computación en niebla. Desde la perspectiva central de Internet, nos centramos en las vulnerabilidades de dos protocolos de enrutamiento clave que desempeñan un papel fundamental en el presente y el futuro de Internet, el Protocolo de Puerta de Enlace Fronterizo (BGP) y el Protocolo de Separación Identificador/Localizador (LISP ). Para ello, primero investigamos las vulnerabilidades y medidas para contrarrestar un problema no resuelto en BGP definido como Route Leaks. Proponemos metodologías pragmáticas de seguridad para desacoplar la protección con las siguientes ventajas: no cambios en el protocolo BGP, cero dependencia en la información de terceros, ni de infraestructura de seguridad de terceros, y de beneficio propio. Del mismo modo, investigamos las vulnerabilidades actuales sobre LISP con énfasis en su plano de control y soporte de movilidad. Aprovechamos la separacçón de sus planos de control y de datos para proponer un proceso mejorado de registro de identificadores de ubicación y punto final, validando de forma segura sus respectivas autorizaciones. Esta propuesta mejora la movilidad de los usuarios finales con respecto a segurar un enrutamiento dinámico del tráfico a través de Internet. En paralelo, desde el punto de vista de usuarios finales y dispositivos investigamos nuevos paradigmas y arquitecturas con el objetivo de mejorar su protección de forma controlable y consolidada. Con este fin, proponemos un nuevo paradigma hacia una protección centrada en el usuario. Nuestra propuesta se centra en el desacoplamiento o ampliación de la protección de seguridad de los dispositivos finales hacia el borde de la red. La misma busca la homogeneización de la protección del usuario independientemente del dispositivo utilizado. Además, investigamos este paradigma en un escenario con movilidad. Validamos nuestra propuesta proporcionando resultados experimentales obtenidos de diferentes experimentos y pruebas de concepto implementados

Novel architectures and strategies for security offloading

Internet has become an indispensable and powerful tool in our modern society. Its ubiquitousness, pervasiveness and applicability have fostered paradigm changes around many aspects of our lives. This phenomena has positioned the network and its services as fundamental assets over which we rely and trust. However, Internet is far from being perfect. It has considerable security issues and vulnerabilities that jeopardize its main core functionalities with negative impact over its players. Furthermore, these vulnerabilities¿ complexities have been amplified along with the evolution of Internet user mobility. In general, Internet security includes both security for the correct network operation and security for the network users and endpoint devices. The former involves the challenges around the Internet core control and management vulnerabilities, while the latter encompasses security vulnerabilities over end users and endpoint devices. Similarly, Internet mobility poses major security challenges ranging from routing complications, connectivity disruptions and lack of global authentication and authorization. The purpose of this thesis is to present the design of novel architectures and strategies for improving Internet security in a non-disruptive manner. Our novel security proposals follow a protection offloading approach. The motives behind this paradigm target the further enhancement of the security protection while minimizing the intrusiveness and disturbance over the Internet routing protocols, its players and users. To accomplish such level of transparency, the envisioned solutions leverage on well-known technologies, namely, Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization and Fog Computing. From the Internet core building blocks, we focus on the vulnerabilities of two key routing protocols that play a fundamental role in the present and the future of the Internet, i.e., the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Locator-Identifier Split Protocol (LISP). To this purpose, we first investigate current BGP vulnerabilities and countermeasures with emphasis in an unresolved security issue defined as Route Leaks. Therein, we discuss the reasons why different BGP security proposals have failed to be adopted, and the necessity to propose innovative solutions that minimize the impact over the already deployed routing solution. To this end, we propose pragmatic security methodologies to offload the protection with the following advantages: no changes to the BGP protocol, neither dependency on third party information nor on third party security infrastructure, and self-beneficial. Similarly, we research the current LISP vulnerabilities with emphasis on its control plane and mobility support. We leverage its by-design separation of control and data planes to propose an enhanced location-identifier registration process of end point identifiers. This proposal improves the mobility of end users with regards on securing a dynamic traffic steering over the Internet. On the other hand, from the end user and devices perspective we research new paradigms and architectures with the aim of enhancing their protection in a more controllable and consolidated manner. To this end, we propose a new paradigm which shifts the device-centric protection paradigm toward a user-centric protection. Our proposal focus on the decoupling or extending of the security protection from the end devices toward the network edge. It seeks the homogenization of the enforced protection per user independently of the device utilized. We further investigate this paradigm in a mobility user scenario. Similarly, we extend this proposed paradigm to the IoT realm and its intrinsic security challenges. Therein, we propose an alternative to protect both the things, and the services that leverage from them by consolidating the security at the network edge. We validate our proposal by providing experimental results from prof-of-concepts implementations.Internet se ha convertido en una poderosa e indispensable herramienta para nuestra sociedad moderna. Su omnipresencia y aplicabilidad han promovido grandes cambios en diferentes aspectos de nuestras vidas. Este fenómeno ha posicionado a la red y sus servicios como activos fundamentales sobre los que contamos y confiamos. Sin embargo, Internet está lejos de ser perfecto. Tiene considerables problemas de seguridad y vulnerabilidades que ponen en peligro sus principales funcionalidades. Además, las complejidades de estas vulnerabilidades se han ampliado junto con la evolución de la movilidad de usuarios de Internet y su limitado soporte. La seguridad de Internet incluye tanto la seguridad para el correcto funcionamiento de la red como la seguridad para los usuarios y sus dispositivos. El primero implica los desafíos relacionados con las vulnerabilidades de control y gestión de la infraestructura central de Internet, mientras que el segundo abarca las vulnerabilidades de seguridad sobre los usuarios finales y sus dispositivos. Del mismo modo, la movilidad en Internet plantea importantes desafíos de seguridad que van desde las complicaciones de enrutamiento, interrupciones de la conectividad y falta de autenticación y autorización globales. El propósito de esta tesis es presentar el diseño de nuevas arquitecturas y estrategias para mejorar la seguridad de Internet de una manera no perturbadora. Nuestras propuestas de seguridad siguen un enfoque de desacople de la protección. Los motivos detrás de este paradigma apuntan a la mejora adicional de la seguridad mientras que minimizan la intrusividad y la perturbación sobre los protocolos de enrutamiento de Internet, sus actores y usuarios. Para lograr este nivel de transparencia, las soluciones previstas aprovechan nuevas tecnologías, como redes definidas por software (SDN), virtualización de funciones de red (VNF) y computación en niebla. Desde la perspectiva central de Internet, nos centramos en las vulnerabilidades de dos protocolos de enrutamiento clave que desempeñan un papel fundamental en el presente y el futuro de Internet, el Protocolo de Puerta de Enlace Fronterizo (BGP) y el Protocolo de Separación Identificador/Localizador (LISP ). Para ello, primero investigamos las vulnerabilidades y medidas para contrarrestar un problema no resuelto en BGP definido como Route Leaks. Proponemos metodologías pragmáticas de seguridad para desacoplar la protección con las siguientes ventajas: no cambios en el protocolo BGP, cero dependencia en la información de terceros, ni de infraestructura de seguridad de terceros, y de beneficio propio. Del mismo modo, investigamos las vulnerabilidades actuales sobre LISP con énfasis en su plano de control y soporte de movilidad. Aprovechamos la separacçón de sus planos de control y de datos para proponer un proceso mejorado de registro de identificadores de ubicación y punto final, validando de forma segura sus respectivas autorizaciones. Esta propuesta mejora la movilidad de los usuarios finales con respecto a segurar un enrutamiento dinámico del tráfico a través de Internet. En paralelo, desde el punto de vista de usuarios finales y dispositivos investigamos nuevos paradigmas y arquitecturas con el objetivo de mejorar su protección de forma controlable y consolidada. Con este fin, proponemos un nuevo paradigma hacia una protección centrada en el usuario. Nuestra propuesta se centra en el desacoplamiento o ampliación de la protección de seguridad de los dispositivos finales hacia el borde de la red. La misma busca la homogeneización de la protección del usuario independientemente del dispositivo utilizado. Además, investigamos este paradigma en un escenario con movilidad. Validamos nuestra propuesta proporcionando resultados experimentales obtenidos de diferentes experimentos y pruebas de concepto implementados.Postprint (published version

Internet Interconnection Ecosystem in Finland

For both fixed and mobile network operators, interconnection constitutes an indisputably key element to provide end users with a variety of services. Internet interconnection is particularly an intriguing subject due to the importance of the Internet in our everyday lives and our genuine curiosity to grasp its underlying structure. This thesis aims to provide a holistic approach to study the Internet interconnections in a nation-centric stance. To accomplish the objective, initially the method that breaks down the key features of the interconnection analysis is introduced. The nation-centric analysis is conducted for Finland by jointly utilizing the Internet registry data and collected Internet routing data. Covering the last decade of the Finnish Internet, the longitudinal analysis yields significant findings for the Internet address usage statistics and the level of multi-homed networks, along with the classification and inference of relationships between stakeholders in the interconnection ecosystem. The implications that the emerging interconnection models pose for the future global service delivery among both fixed and mobile networks are expounded from the perspective of the existing domestic interconnection practices. The longitudinal interconnectivity study allows us to comprehend both technical and business interfaces between market players by revealing a complete list of customer-provider relationships. Within a national milieu, the assessment of the current Internet market dynamics and future implications of emerging models can be considered in more rationally anticipated manner. Hence, authorities who desire to design new pricing schemes and policies for future networking interconnections can be guided more thoroughly

Improving the Accuracy of the Internet Cartography

As the global Internet expands to satisfy the demands of the ever-increasing connected population, profound changes are occurring in its interconnection structure. The pervasive growth of IXPs and CDNs, two initially independent but synergistic infrastructure sectors, have contributed to the gradual flattening of the Internet’s inter-domain hierarchy with primary routing paths shifting from backbone networks to peripheral peering links. At the same time the IPv6 deployment has taken off due to the depletion of unallocated IPv4 addresses. These fundamental changes in Internet dynamics has obvious implications for network engineering and operations, which can be benefited by accurate topology maps to understand the properties of this critical infrastructure. This thesis presents a set of new measurement techniques and inference algorithms to construct a new type of semantically rich Internet map, and improve the state of the art in Internet cartography. The author first develops a methodology to extract large-scale validation data from the Communities BGP attribute, which encodes rich routing meta-data on BGP messages. Based on this better-informed dataset the author proceeds to analyse popular assumptions about inter-domain routing policies and devise a more accurate model to describe inter-AS business relationships. Accordingly, the thesis proposes a new relationship inference algorithm to accurately capture both simple and complex AS relationships across two dimensions: prefix type, and geographic location. Validation against three sources of ground-truth data reveals that the proposed algorithm achieves a near-perfect accuracy. However, any inference approach is constrained by the inability of the existing topology data sources to provide a complete view of the inter-domain topology. To limit the topology incompleteness problem the author augments traditional BGP data with routing policy data obtained directly from IXPs to discover massive peering meshes which have thus far been largely invisible

A pragmatic approach toward securing inter-domain routing

Internet security poses complex challenges at different levels, where even the basic requirement of availability of Internet connectivity becomes a conundrum sometimes. Recent Internet service disruption events have made the vulnerability of the Internet apparent, and exposed the current limitations of Internet security measures as well. Usually, the main cause of such incidents, even in the presence of the security measures proposed so far, is the unintended or intended exploitation of the loop holes in the protocols that govern the Internet. In this thesis, we focus on the security of two different protocols that were conceived with little or no security mechanisms but play a key role both in the present and the future of the Internet, namely the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and the Locator Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). The BGP protocol, being the de-facto inter-domain routing protocol in the Internet, plays a crucial role in current communications. Due to lack of any intrinsic security mechanism, it is prone to a number of vulnerabilities that can result in partial paralysis of the Internet. In light of this, numerous security strategies were proposed but none of them were pragmatic enough to be widely accepted and only minor security tweaks have found the pathway to be adopted. Even the recent IETF Secure Inter-Domain Routing (SIDR) Working Group (WG) efforts including, the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), Route Origin authorizations (ROAs), and BGP Security (BGPSEC) do not address the policy related security issues, such as Route Leaks (RL). Route leaks occur due to violation of the export routing policies among the Autonomous Systems (ASes). Route leaks not only have the potential to cause large scale Internet service disruptions but can result in traffic hijacking as well. In this part of the thesis, we examine the route leak problem and propose pragmatic security methodologies which a) require no changes to the BGP protocol, b) are neither dependent on third party information nor on third party security infrastructure, and c) are self-beneficial regardless of their adoption by other players. Our main contributions in this part of the thesis include a) a theoretical framework, which, under realistic assumptions, enables a domain to autonomously determine if a particular received route advertisement corresponds to a route leak, and b) three incremental detection techniques, namely Cross-Path (CP), Benign Fool Back (BFB), and Reverse Benign Fool Back (R-BFB). Our strength resides in the fact that these detection techniques solely require the analytical usage of in-house control-plane, data-plane and direct neighbor relationships information. We evaluate the performance of the three proposed route leak detection techniques both through real-time experiments as well as using simulations at large scale. Our results show that the proposed detection techniques achieve high success rates for countering route leaks in different scenarios. The motivation behind LISP protocol has shifted over time from solving routing scalability issues in the core Internet to a set of vital use cases for which LISP stands as a technology enabler. The IETF's LISP WG has recently started to work toward securing LISP, but the protocol still lacks end-to-end mechanisms for securing the overall registration process on the mapping system ensuring RLOC authorization and EID authorization. As a result LISP is unprotected against different attacks, such as RLOC spoofing, which can cripple even its basic functionality. For that purpose, in this part of the thesis we address the above mentioned issues and propose practical solutions that counter them. Our solutions take advantage of the low technological inertia of the LISP protocol. The changes proposed for the LISP protocol and the utilization of existing security infrastructure in our solutions enable resource authorizations and lay the foundation for the needed end-to-end security

Acyclic type-of-relationship problems on the Internet

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