A cascading failure model for interdomain routing system

Abstract

There have been many researches on border gateway protocol (BGP) security, most of which mainly focused on how to enhance the security of the BGP protocol or the interdomain routing system. However, few works studied the vulnerabilities especially the production mechanism of security events in the interdomain routing system. It takes many obstacles to understand and improve the security of the interdomain routing system. This paper explores the cascading failure phenomenon of the interdomain routing system. First, we devise a state machine to describe the state transition of BGP nodes and then give a detailed analysis of the BGP failure. Second, on the basis of the preferential attachment characteristic, we propose a cascading failure model for the interdomain routing system, which depicts the production mechanism of cascading failure, and introduce two evaluating indicators, the proportion of failed nodes and the proportion of failed links, to assess the scale of cascading failure. Furthermore, we apply the cascading failure model to display two different cascading failure scenes. The experimental results show that random failure has less influence on the interdomain routing system, while its robustness against hostile attack is weak. Copyright ©2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.