Observing BGP route poisoning in the wild

Abstract

On the Internet, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard to construct inter-domain routes among autonomous systems (ASes). Data traffic follows the inverse direction of BGP route propagation. For the outbound traffic, an AS can make its own selection in the range of the routes received from its peering neighbor ASes, and change the traffic outbound paths for better performance or bypassing failures. It is more difficult for ASes to control inbound traffic paths because it cannot determine the selection for remote ASes. An AS only has to manipulate BGP path attributes of the advertised prefixes it owns to trigger the potential path change from other ASes to itself.