SiDR: a Secure inter-Domain Routing protocol for future internet

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on August 26, 2011Thesis advisor: Deep MedhiVitaIncludes bibliographic references (p. 30-33)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011Inter-domain routing is a critical functionality that help connect autonomous systems in the Internet. In recent years, there have been concerns in regard to its vulnerabilities such as IP prefix hijacking and worm attacks. Many of the problems in the inter domain routing arises from the protocol complexity, lack of support for underlying policies, vulnerabilities, convergence and route stability, scalability and isolation. A number of approaches have been proposed to address the known vulnerabilities. In this work, we propose an inter-domain routing protocol for future evolution of the Internet. Our approach, SiDR (Secure inter Domain Routing Protocol), addresses security and benefits from novel technique such as Attribute Based Cryptography (ABE) for achieving policy routing and information hiding. SiDR offers a new perspective and direction for discussions on inter domain routing. We focus on two aspects of inter domain routing that is of paramount importance; routing policies and security.Introduction -- Attribute based encryption -- SiDR design -- SiDR: protocol analysis -- Evaluation and discussion -- Summary and future wor

Measuring exposure in DDoS protection services

Denial-of-Service attacks have rapidly gained in popularity over the last decade. The increase in frequency, size, and complexity of attacks has made DDoS Protection Services (DPS) an attractive mitigation solution to which the protection of services can be outsourced. Despite a thriving market and increasing adoption of protection services, a DPS can often be bypassed, and direct attacks can be launched against the origin of a target. Many protection services leverage the Domain Name System (DNS) to protect, e.g., Web sites. When the DNS is misconfigured, the origin IP address of a target can leak to attackers, which defeats the purpose of outsourcing protection. We perform a large-scale analysis of this phenomenon by using three large data sets that cover a 16-month period: a data set of active DNS measurements; a DNS-based data set that focuses on DPS adoption; and a data set of DoS attacks inferred from backscatter traffic to a sizable darknet. We analyze nearly 11k Web sites on Alexa's top 1M that outsource protection, for eight leading DPS providers. Our results show that 40% of these Web sites expose the origin in the DNS. Moreover, we show that the origin of 19% of these Web sites is targeted after outsourcing protection

Abstracting network policies

Almost every human activity in recent years relies either directly or indirectly on the smooth and efficient operation of the Internet. The Internet is an interconnection of multiple autonomous networks that work based on agreed upon policies between various institutions across the world. The network policies guiding an institution’s computer infrastructure both internally (such as firewall relationships) and externally (such as routing relationships) are developed by a diverse group of lawyers, accountants, network administrators, managers amongst others. Network policies developed by this group of individuals are usually done on a white-board in a graph-like format. It is however the responsibility of network administrators to translate and configure the various network policies that have been agreed upon. The configuration of these network policies are generally done on physical devices such as routers, domain name servers, firewalls and other middle boxes. The manual configuration process of such network policies is known to be tedious, time consuming and prone to human error which can lead to various network anomalies in the configuration commands. In recent years, many research projects and corporate organisations have to some level abstracted the network management process with emphasis on network devices (such as Cisco VIRL) or individual network policies (such as Propane). [Continues.]</div

Multi-homing tunnel broker

A proper support for communications has to provide fault tolerance capabilities such as the preservation of established connections in case of failures. Multihoming addresses this issue, but the currently available solution based in massive BGP route injection presents serious scalability limitations, since it contributes to the exponential growth of the BGP table size. An alternative solution based on the configuration of tunnels between the multihomed site exit routers and the ISP border routers has been proposed for IPv6 in RFC 3178. However, the amount of manual configuration imposed by this solution on the ISP side prevents its wide adoption. In particular, this solution requires at the ISP the manual configuration of a tunnel endpoint per each multihomed client that it serves. We present a multihoming tunnel broker (MHTB) that provides automatic creation of the tunnel endpoint at the ISP side.This work was supported by the SAM (Advanced Servers with Mobility)project, funded by the Spanish National research and Development Programme as TIC2002-04531-C04-03.Publicad

Analysis of Effects of BGP Black Hole Routing on a Network like the NIPRNET

The Department of Defense (DoD) relies heavily on the Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNET) to exchange information freely between departments, services, bases, posts, and ships. The NIPRNET is vulnerable to various attacks, to include physical and cyber attacks. One of the most frequently used cyber attacks by criminally motivated hackers is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks can be used to exhaust network bandwidth and router processing capabilities, and as a leveraging tool for extortion. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) black hole routing is a responsive defensive network technique for mitigating DDoS attacks. BGP black hole routing directs traffic destined to an Internet address under attack to a null address, essentially stopping the DDoS attack by dropping all traffic to the targeted system. This research examines the ability of BGP black hole routing to effectively defend a network like the NIPRNET from a DDoS attack, as well as examining two different techniques for triggering BGP black hole routing during a DDoS attack. This thesis presents experiments with three different DDoS attack scenarios to determine the effectiveness of BGP black hole routing. Remote-triggered black hole routing is then compared against customer-triggered black hole routing to examine how well each technique reacts under a DDoS attack. The results from this study show BGP black hole routing to be highly successful. It also shows that remote-triggered black hole routing is much more effective than customer-triggered

It bends but would it break?:topological analysis of BGP infrastructures in Europe

The Internet is often thought to be a model of resilience, due to a decentralised, organically-grown architecture. This paper puts this perception into perspective through the results of a security analysis of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing infrastructure. BGP is a fundamental Internet protocol and its intrinsic fragilities have been highlighted extensively in the literature. A seldom studied aspect is how robust the BGP infrastructure actually is as a result of nearly three decades of perpetual growth. Although global black-outs seem unlikely, local security events raise growing concerns on the robustness of the backbone. In order to better protect this critical infrastructure, it is crucial to understand its topology in the context of the weaknesses of BGP and to identify possible security scenarios. Firstly, we establish a comprehensive threat model that classifies main attack vectors, including but non limited to BGP vulnerabilities. We then construct maps of the European BGP backbone based on publicly available routing data. We analyse the topology of the backbone and establish several disruption scenarios that highlight the possible consequences of different types of attacks, for different attack capabilities. We also discuss existing mitigation and recovery strategies, and we propose improvements to enhance the robustness and resilience of the backbone. To our knowledge, this study is the first to combine a comprehensive threat analysis of BGP infrastructures withadvanced network topology considerations. We find that the BGP infrastructure is at higher risk than already understood, due to topologies that remain vulnerable to certain targeted attacks as a result of organic deployment over the years. Significant parts of the system are still uncharted territory, which warrants further investigation in this direction