Forensic Analysis of Autonomous System Reachability

Abstract

Security incidents have an adverse impact not only on end systems, but also on Internet routing, resulting in many out-of-reach prefixes. Previous work has looked at performance degradation in the data plane in terms of delay and loss. Also it has been reported that the number of routing updates increased significantly, which could be a reflection of increased routing instability in the control domain. In this paper, we perform a detailed forensic analysis of routing instability during known security incidents and present useful metrics in assessing damage in AS reachability. Any change in AS reachability is a direct indication of whether the AS had fallen victim to the security incident or not.We choose the Slammer worm attack in January, 2003, as a security incident for closer examination. For our forensic analysis, we use BGP routing data from RouteViews and RIPE. As a way to quantify AS reachability, we propose the following metrics: the prefix count and the address count. The number of unique prefixes in routing tables during the attack fluctuates greatly, but it does not represent the real scope of damage. We define the address count as the cardinality of the set of IP addresses an AS is responsible for either as an origin or transit AS, and observe how address counts changed over time. These two metrics together draw an accurate picture of how reachability to or through the AS had been affected. Though our analysis was done off-line, our methodology can be applied on-line and used in quick real-time assessment of AS reachability.