CAFAI, le 20/11/2013 à 06:13
Traffic interception has certainly been a hot topic in 2013. The world has been focused on interception carried out the old fashioned way, by getting into the right buildings and listening to the right cables. But there’s actually been a significant uptick this year in a completely different kind of attack, one that can be carried out by anybody, at a distance, using Internet route hijacking.
After consultations with many of the affected parties, we’re coming forth with some details in the hope that we can make this particular vulnerability obsolete.
Understanding the Threat
At Renesys, we watch the Internet 24/7 for our enterprise customers, to help them understand and respond to Internet impairment before it affects their businesses. Many of those impairments are the result of someone else’s well-intended Internet traffic engineering. Some are accidents, like cable cuts or natural disasters, and that’s what you typically see us blog about. But a number of Internet impairments are hard to explain by blind chance or bad luck, and that’s our focus today.
For years, we’ve observed that there was potential for someone to weaponize the classic Pakistan-and-Youtube style route hijack. Why settle for simple denial of service, when you can instead steal a victim’s traffic, take a few milliseconds to inspect or modify it, and then pass it along to the intended recipient?
This year, that potential has become reality. We have actually observed live Man-In-the-Middle (MITM) hijacks on more than 60 days so far this year. About 1,500 individual IP blocks have been hijacked, in events lasting from minutes to days, by attackers working from various countries.
Simple BGP alarming is not sufficient to distinguish MITM from a generic route hijacking or fat-finger routing mistake; you have to follow up with active path measurements while the attack is underway in order to verify that traffic is being simultaneously diverted and then redelivered to the victim. We’ve done that here.
Here’s a map of 150 cities in which we’ve observed at least one victim of a validated MITM route hijacking attack so far this year (click to inspect). The victims have been diverse: financial institutions, VoIP providers, and world governments have been prominent targets. global-hijack-cities
What makes a Man-in-the-Middle routing attack different from a simple route hijack? Simply put, the traffic keeps flowing and everything looks fine to the recipient. The attackers keep at least one outbound path clean. After they receive and inspect the victim’s traffic, they release it right back onto the Internet, and the clean path delivers it to its intended destination. If the hijacker is in a plausible geographic location between the victim and its counterparties, they should not even notice the increase in latency that results from the interception. It’s possible to drag specific Internet traffic halfway around the world, inspect it, modify it if desired, and send it on its way. Who needs fiberoptic taps?
It’s even possible to see these attacks as they are occurring, if you have the right global measurement infrastructure. Renesys maintains a realtime view of the Internet from hundreds of independent BGP vantage points. We have to, because that’s how we can detect evidence of Internet impairment worldwide, even when that impairment is localized. We also maintain an active measurement infrastructure that sends out billions of measurement packets each day, crisscrossing the Internet in search of impaired or unusual paths like these. Finally, we have a distributed realtime-taskable measurement system that allows us to trigger quick measurements from all over the planet when trouble is detected in a region, so that we can immediately evaluate its significance.
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