Computational complexity of traffic hijacking under BGP and S-BGP

  • Authors:
  • Marco Chiesa;Giuseppe Di Battista;Thomas Erlebach;Maurizio Patrignani

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. of Computer Science and Automation, Roma Tre University, Italy;Dept. of Computer Science and Automation, Roma Tre University, Italy;Dept. of Computer Science, University of Leicester, UK;Dept. of Computer Science and Automation, Roma Tre University, Italy

  • Venue:
  • ICALP'12 Proceedings of the 39th international colloquium conference on Automata, Languages, and Programming - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Harmful Internet hijacking incidents put in evidence how fragile the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is, which is used to exchange routing information between Autonomous Systems (ASes). As proved by recent research contributions, even S-BGP, the secure variant of BGP that is being deployed, is not fully able to blunt traffic attraction attacks. Given a traffic flow between two ASes, we study how difficult it is for a malicious AS to devise a strategy for hijacking or intercepting that flow. We show that this problem marks a sharp difference between BGP and S-BGP. Namely, while it is solvable, under reasonable assumptions, in polynomial time for the type of attacks that are usually performed in BGP, it is NP-hard for S-BGP. Our study has several by-products. E.g., we solve a problem left open in the literature, stating when performing a hijacking in S-BGP is equivalent to performing an interception.