The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the primary routing protocol for the Internet backbone, yet it lacks adequate security mechanisms. While simple BGP hijack attacks only involve an adversary hijacking Internet traffic destined to a victim, more complex and challenging interception attacks require that adversary intercept a victim's traffic and forward it on to the victim. If an interception attack is launched incorrectly, the adversary's attack will disrupt its route to the victim making it impossible to forward packets. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SICO attacks (Surgical Interception using COmmunities): a novel method of launching interception attacks that leverages BGP communities to scope an adversary's attack and ensure a route to the victim. We then show how SICO attacks can be targeted to specific source IP addresses for reducing attack costs. Furthermore, we ethically perform SICO attacks on the real Internet backbone to evaluate their feasibility and effectiveness. Results suggest that SICO attacks can achieve interception even when previously proposed attacks would not be feasible and outperforms them by attracting traffic from an additional 16% of Internet hosts (worst case) and 58% of Internet hosts (best case). Finally, we analyze the Internet topology to find that at least 83% of multi-homed ASes are capable of launching these attacks.
Application-layer and network-layer defenses are critical for fortifying routing attacks.
Multiple-vantage-point domain control validation (multiVA) is an emerging defense for mitigating BGP hijacking attacks against certificate authorities. While the adoption of mul-tiVA is on the rise, little work has quantified its effectiveness against BGP hijacks in the wild. We bridge the gap by presenting the first analysis framework that measures the security of a multiVA deployment under real-world network configurations (e.g., DNS and RPKI). Our framework accurately models the attack surface of multiVA by 1) considering the attacks on DNS nameservers involved in domain validation, 2) considering deployed practical security techniques such as RPKI, 3) performing fine-grained internet-scale analysis to compute multiVA resilience (i.e., how difficult it is to launch a BGP hijack against a domain and get a bogus certificate under multiVA). We use our framework to perform a rigorous security analysis of the multiVA deployment of Let's Encrypt, using a dataset that consists of about 1 million certificates and 31 billion DNS queries collected over four months. Our analysis shows while DNS does enlarge the attack surface of multiVA, the of Let's Encrypt's multiVA deployment still offers an 88% median resilience against BGP hijacks, a notable improvement over 76% offered by single-vantage-point validation. RPKI, even in its current state of partial deployment, effectively mitigates BGP attacks and improves the security of the deployment by 15% as compared to the case without considering RPKI. Exploring 11,000 different multiVA configurations, we find that Let's Encrypt's deployment can be further enhanced to achieve a resilience of over 99% by using a full quorum policy with only two additional vantage points in different public clouds.
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