Secure Split Assignment Trajectory Sampling: A Malicious Router Detection System

Abstract

Routing infrastructure plays a vital role in the Internet, and attacks on routers can be damaging. Compromised routers can drop, modify, mis-forward or reorder valid packets. Existing proposals for secure forwarding require substantial computational overhead and additional capabilities at routers. We propose secure split assignment trajectory sampling (SATS), a system that detects malicious routers on the data plane. SATS locates a set of suspicious routers when packets do not follow their predicted paths. It works with a traffic measurement platform using packet sampling, has low overhead on routers and is applicable to high-speed networks. Different subsets of packets are sampled over different groups of routers to ensure that an attacker cannot completely evade detection. Our evaluation shows that SATS can significantly limit a malicious router's harm to a small portion of traffic in a network