Internet resiliency to attacks and failures under BGP policy routing

Abstract

We investigate the resiliency of the Internet at the Autonomous System (AS) level to failures and attacks, under the real constraint of business agreements between the ASs. The agreements impose policies that govern routing in the AS level, and thus the resulting topology graph is directed, and thus the teachability between Ases is not transitive. We show, using partial views obtained from the Internet, that the Internet's resiliency to a deliberate attack is much smaller than previously found, and its teachability is also somewhat lower under random failures. We use different metrics to measure resiliency, and also investigate the effect of added backup connectivity on the resiliency.