A BGP Attack Against Traffic Engineering

Abstract

As the Internet grows, traffic engineering has become a widely-used technique to control the flow of packets. For the inter-domain routing, traffic engineering relies on configurations of the border gateway protocol (BGP). While it is recognized that the misconfiguration of BGP can cause negative effects on the Internet, we consider attack methods that disable traffic engineering regardless of the correctness of configurations. We focus on the redirection of traffic as our attack objective, and present attack scenarios on some dominant sample network topologies to achieve this objective. We also evaluate and validate these attacks using two different discrete-event simulators, one that models BGP behavior on a network, and another that emulates it using direct-execution of working BGP code.