BGP Anomaly Detection

BGP Anomaly Detection
Bahaa Al-Musawi
PhD candidate
Supervisors: Dr. Philip Branch and Prof.
Grenville Armitage
balmusawi@swin.edu.au
Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures (CAIA)
Swinburne University of Technology

http://caia.swin.edu.au balmusawi@swin.edu.au 11 June 2015 2CAIA Seminar
Outline
• BGP
• BGP Anomalies
• BGP Testbed
• Summary

Outline
• BGP
• BGP Anomalies
• BGP Testbed
• Summary

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
• The Internet is a decentralized global network
comprised of tens of thousands of Autonomous
Systems (ASes)
• BGP is the Internet’s default Inter-domain routing
protocol
An example of routing topology

• BGP (RFC1105), BGP2 (RFC1163), BGP3
(RFC1267), and BGP4 with last revision (RFC4271)
• BGP is a path vector protocol
• BGP supports Classless Inter-domain Routing (CIDR),
ex. prefix 192.2.2.0/24 192.2.2.1-192.2.2.255

Connecting a new BGP router
• BGP is an incremental protocol
• Routing Information Base (RIB)
• Updates

Announcing a new prefix by an AS
• BGP is an incremental protocol
• Routing Information Base (RIB)
• Updates

BGP Policies
• ASes are the unit of routing policy in BGP
• ASes relationships: customer-provider and peer-to-peer
• BGP routing policies:
• Business relationships
• Traffic engineering
• Scalability
• Security related policies
• Number of configuration lines in a single BGP
router can range from hundreds to thousands lines

Growth of BGP Table since 1994 from http://bgp.potaroo.net/

BGP Weakness
• BGP based on the trust between all its participants
• BGP does not employ any authentication measures for
advertising routes
• BGP is vulnerable to different types of attacks
• 2005, TTNet announced more than 100,000 incorrect routes
• 2006, AS27506 hijacked panix domain
• 2012, Dodo ISP incident

Outline
• BGP
• BGP Anomalies
• BGP Testbed
• Summary

BGP Anomalies
• Anomalies are patterns in a data set that do not follow
expected behavior
• No BGP updates are sent when there is no change in
topology and/or policies for a network running BGP
• In the real world, many ASes are unstable causing
propagation of many abnormal BGP updates
• Distinguishing abnormal BGP updates from a serious
attack is a challenge

Types of BGP Anomalies
1. Direct and Intended Disruptions
2. Direct and Unintended Disruptions
3. Indirect Attacks
4. Hardware Failure

• This type of disruption refers to all types of BGP
hijacking which can appear in different scenarios such
as prefix and sub-prefix hijack.

• False Positive
• Legitimate reasons for anomalous routing updates
• Multi-homing with static link aggregation

• Examples
• May 2005, AS174 hijacked one of Google prefixes: lose connectivity to
the google.com domain for nearly an hour
• April 2011, Link Telecom incident: an attacker hijacked AS12812 and its
prefixes for a round 6 months

2. Direct and Unintended Disruptions
• Refers to BGP misconfiguration such as:
• Pakistan incident-2008: advertised an invalid YouTube prefix causing
many ASes to lose access to the site
• Indosat incident-2014: propagated over 320,000 incorrect routes
Pakistan event 2008

3. Indirect Disruptions
• Nimda-2001: around 30 fold increase of BGP updates
was observed
• Slammer-2003: dramatic spikes in number of BGP
updates
Updates Messages During Slammer Attack from 22-29 January 2003

4. Hardware Failure
• Moscow blackout-2005: Several hours
• Mediterranean cable-2008: > 20 countries
Number of BGP Updates during Moscow event

BGP Anomalies Detection Techniques

BGP Statistics
• The huge variance in the size of the Internet is leading
towards increasing instability of BGP
• 40K anomalous route events were reported in the 12
months from May 2011
• 20% of the hijacking and misconfigurations lasted less
than 10 minutes but with the ability to pollute 90% of
the Internet in less than 2 minutes

BGP Anomalies
Key Requirements for a next generation of BGP anomaly
detection:
• Detect in near real-time different types of BGP disruptions
• Identify type of BGP disruptions
• Locate the source of disruption

Outline
• BGP
• BGP Anomalies
• BGP Testbed
• Summary

BGP Testbed
Why BGP Testbed is important ?
1.Lack of ground truth timestamps for available BGP
anomalies events
2.Enable examination of different types of BGP anomalies
to help in their identification
3.On available BGP testbeds such as the PEER project,
no hijacking or misconfiguration is allowed

BGP Testbed
Types of BGP testbed that have been used:
1.Quagga
2.Swinburne/ ICT Cisco Labs
3.Virtual Internet Routing Lab (VIRL)

Quagga
• Routing S/W package that provides TCP/IP based
routing services.
• Supports many routing protocols such as RIP, OSPF,
IS-IS, and BGP
Simple BGP Topology on 9 VMs running Quagga

Quagga
• Difficult to manage large scale network topology
• No Virtualization support
• No. of nodes is limited to H/W specifications
• No chance to try other router OSs such as IOS and
Junos

Swinburne/ICT Cisco Labs
• Totally 265 Cisco routers
• 205 routers Cisco model 2811
• 60 routers Cisco model 2620XM
• Swinburne offers a tool to manage configuration of
devices

Simple BGP topology

• Time consuming to setup and tear-down a network
• Limited availability of labs because of teaching

Managing connections
• Difficult to manage network connections with a large
scale network

• Still difficult to manage configuration of routers in a
large scale network
• No Virtualization capability
• No chance to try latest Cisco IOS versions or other
Routers OSs

VIRL Cisco Software
• Virtual Internet Routing Lab
• Uses VMMaestro, OpenStack, Autonetkit, and Ubuntu

VIRL Cisco Software
• Easy to setup and teardown a network
• Portability and repeatability
• Virtualization capability
• Simplified packet capture
• Deployment of different OSs
• Cisco IOS such IOS,IOS XR, IOS XE, and NX-OS
• Servers such as Ubuntu and FreeBSD

VIRL Cisco Software
15 nodes running on VIRL requires:
• 4 CPU cores
• 8 GB DRAM
• Internet Access
My target network is > 200 nodes which requires
• 40 CPU cores
• 512 GB DRAM
What can I do?

VIRL Cisco Software
• ASK ITS at Swinburne
• 10 nodes each with 8 cores and 24 GB DRAM

Accessing 10 nodes at EN building

VIRL Supports graphml format
http://www.topology-zoo.org/

Current/Future Work
• Apply one of exist global network topologies
• Inject BGP updates
• Create different anomalies and apply different
approaches to detecting them

Outline
• BGP
• BGP Anomalies
• BGP Testbed
• Summary

Summary
• BGP is responsible for managing and exchanging
Network NLRI between ASes with guarantee of
avoiding loops
• BGP is vulnerable to different types of anomalies
• Key requirements for a next generation of BGP
anomalies detection
• Challenges of building BGP testbed especially for
large scale network
• VIRL offers a variety of facilities and options with short
time to setup and tear down a network

Acknowledgment
• VIRL team at Cisco for providing free license and
support
• Simon Forsayeth from ITS / Swinburne University for
his help and support to make the use of 10 nodes
possible with VIRL

Questions

BGP Anomaly Detection

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