Information Monitoring in Routing Networks

Despite the large effort devoted to cybersecurity research over the last decades, cyber intrusions and attacks are still increasing, constantly challenging the design of the current system. The increasingly frequent events of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) route hijacking have brought the topic of traffic interception into attention. While numerous edits and improvements are proposed for BGP, a theoretical understanding of the fundamental design of this system is missing. Here we define and analyze an abstract model of information monitoring in routing networks. Specifically, we study algorithms that measure the potential of groups of dishonest agents to divert traffic through their infrastructure under the constraint that messages must reach their intended destinations. We relate two variants of our model based on the allowed kinds of lies, define strategies for colluding agents, and prove optimality in special cases. In our main theorem we derive a provably optimal monitoring strategy for subsets of agents in which no two are adjacent, and we extend this strategy to the general case. Finally, we use our results to analyze the susceptibility of real and synthetic networks to endogenous information monitoring. In the Autonomous Systems (AS) graph of the United States, we show that compromising only 18 random nodes in the AS graph surprisingly captures 10% of all traffic of the network in expectation. a Corresponding author: [email protected] 1 ar X iv :1 50 7. 05 20 6v 1 [ cs .C R ] 1 8 Ju l 2 01 5