Computational complexity of traffic hijacking under BGP and S-BGP

Abstract

Harmful Internet hijacking incidents put in evidence how fragile interdomain routing is. In particular, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to exchange routing information between Internet entities, called Autonomous Systems (ASes), proved to be prone to attacks launched by a single malicious AS. Recent research contributions pointed out that 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. The goal of the attack is to attract a traffic flow towards the malicious AS. While in the hijacking attack connectivity between the endpoints of a flow can be disrupted, in the interception attack connectivity must be maintained. 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.