Analysis of IP Prefix Hijacking and Traffic Interception

In the Internet, BGP is de facto inter-domain routing protocol. And it is vulnerable to a number of damaging attacks. Among these attacks, IP prefix hijacking and traffic interception are regarded as the serious threats in the Internet. There have been many incidents of IP prefix hijacking in the Internet. The hijacking AS can blackhole the hijacked traffic by introducing network unreachability problem. Alternatively, it can transparently intercept the hijacked traffic by forwarding it onto the owner. Although there is no reported incident about traffic interception yet, it cannot be said that there was no such attack in the Internet. Because traffic interception does not introduce any network unreachability problem and it is transparent to the victim. Many ideas have been presented to try to detect or prevent prefix hijacking. However, there is no enough analysis towards both areas. This paper makes analysis of IP prefix hijacking and traffic interception for a stepping-stone towards solving these two threats. In this paper, we survey IP prefix hijacking incidents and we present the analysis of IP prefix hijacking and traffic interception.