community real-time BGP hijack notification service

[mmc at internode.com.au (Matthew Moyle-Croft)]

Nathan Ward wrote:
> On 13/09/2008, at 5:48 PM, Matthew Moyle-Croft wrote:
>
>> Arnaud de Prelle wrote:
>>> I think that most of us (me included) are already using it but the
>>> problem is that they don't have BGP collectors everywhere in the world.
>>> This is in fact a generic issue for BGP monitoring.
>>>
>> In this case it's very important to have a lot of collectors broadly 
>> distributed listening in many ASes.
>>
>> For example:
>>
>> If I know there are two BGP collectors driving this service, and 
>> they're in, say, AS701 and AS1239, then if I wanted to do a partial 
>> hijack (which might be good enough for my evil purposes) then I could 
>> advertise a path which had those ASes stuffed in it and prevent 
>> downstream collectors in AS701 and AS1239 from learning the hijack path.
>
>
> Note that the attack becomes less and less effective if you're path 
> stuffing ASes, as it will be preferred by fewer and fewer networks. 
> Put collection points in say 10 networks, and the attack becomes 
> pretty useless.
> Unless of course you are announcing a more specific prefix than the 
> authentic one.
Absolutely - but it depends how wide you want the hijack - a global one 
is very obvious, but you can see that a very narrow one of some sites it 
might be harder (take longer) to detect and live longer.  

ie.  If I just wanted to disrupt a website to a country or region for 
political reasons or just to get the ad revenue for a small amount of 
time, then it might be acceptable to limit the scale in order to evade 
detection. 

I'm not saying this is the end of the world, just reenforcing that 
widely distributed BGP monitors are necessary for detection.   It might 
be that various projects which have these distributed tools etc can help 
by becoming feeds for these kinds of notification projects.

MMC
>
> -- 
> Nathan Ward
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