Taking Routers Off Their Meds: Unstable Routers and the Buggy BGP Implementations That Cause Them
Loading...
View/Download File
Persistent link to this item
Statistics
View StatisticsJournal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Title
Taking Routers Off Their Meds: Unstable Routers and the Buggy BGP Implementations That Cause Them
Published Date
2011-11-30
Publisher
Type
Report
Abstract
Both academic research and historical incidents have shown the impact of unstable BGP speakers on network performance and reliability. A large amount of time and energy has been invested improving router stability. In this paper, we show how an adversary in control of a BGP speaker in a transit AS can cause a victim router in an arbitrary location on the Internet to become unstable. Through experimentation with both hardware and software routers, we examine the behavior of routers under abnormal conditions and come to four conclusions. First, routers placed in certain states behave in anything but a stable manner. Second, unexpected but perfectly legal BGP messages can place routers into those states with disconcerting ease. Third, an adversary can use these messages to disrupt a victim router to which he is not directly connected. Fourth, modern best practices do little to prevent these attacks. These conclusions lead us to recommend more rigorous testing of BGP implementations, focusing as much on protocol correctness as software correctness.
Keywords
Description
Related to
Replaces
License
Series/Report Number
Funding information
Isbn identifier
Doi identifier
Previously Published Citation
Other identifiers
Suggested citation
Schuchard, Max; Thompson, Christopher; Hopper, Nicholas J.; Kim, Yongdae. (2011). Taking Routers Off Their Meds: Unstable Routers and the Buggy BGP Implementations That Cause Them. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/215877.
Content distributed via the University Digital Conservancy may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor. By using these files, users agree to the Terms of Use. Materials in the UDC may contain content that is disturbing and/or harmful. For more information, please see our statement on harmful content in digital repositories.