Get Off My Prefix! The Need for Dynamic, Gerontocratic Policies in Inter-domain Routing
Proceedings of the IEEE Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2011.
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areas
Security,
Networking
abstract
Inter-domain routing in today’s Internet is plagued
by security and reliability issues (e.g., prefix hijacking), which are
often caused by malicious or Byzantine misbehavior. We argue
that route selection policies must move beyond static preferences
that select routes on the basis of static attributes such as route
length or which neighboring AS is advertising the route.
We prove that route convergence in the presence of Byzantine
misbehavior requires that the route selection metric include
the dynamics of route updates as a primary component. We
then describe a class of simple dynamic policies which consider
the observed “ages” of routes. These gerontocratic policies can
be combined with static preferences and implemented without
major infrastructural changes. They guarantee convergence when
adopted universally, without sacrificing most of the flexibility that
autonomous systems enjoy in route selection. We empirically
demonstrate that even if adopted unilaterally by a single autonomous system, gerontocratic policies yield significantly more
stable routes, are more effective at avoiding prefix hijacks, and
are as responsive to legitimate route changes as other policies.