On evaluating BGP routing stress attack

The routing system is playing a critical role in the Internet. Numerous routing security events reveal that the Internet is not so dependable yet. Some hackers even boasted that they could bring down the whole Internet in a short time. This paper investigates a new attack on BGP routing system inspired from synchronization and resonance in complex system. The attack applies routing stress by periodically injecting and propagating excessive BGP routing advertisements which are beyond the processing ability and the storage capacity of the BGP routers in the routing system. Our contributions are twofold. First, we describe a BGP routing stress attack method inspired from synchronization and resonance of complex network. Second, we devise a cascading failure model to evaluate the robustness under BGP routing stress attack on the real Internet AS-level topology. We measure the dependability and the connectivity under cascading failures with three metrics: the proportion of failed ASes, the proportion of failed links, and the proportion of disconnected AS-AS pairs. Our experimental results show that BGP routing stress attack can eventually lead to a high proportion of failures and bring about serious impacts on the connectivity of the Internet routing system. © 2010 Academy Publisher.