Competitive Information Provision Among Internet Routing Nodes

Abstract

In proposed path-aware designs for the Internet, end hosts can select which path their packets use. What criteria should the end hosts use to select paths? Recent work has proposed path-aware access control frameworks in which routing nodes publicly report their knowledge of the security postures of other nodes; end hosts can then base their routing choices on these reports. However, nothing is known regarding the nodes’ incentives to report their knowledge truthfully. In this paper, we consider the case in which each network node is strategic, and seeks to craft its public reports to manipulate traffic patterns in its own favor. In the context of a simple selfish routing problem with two strategic nodes, we show that for a wide swath of the parameter space, each node has a dominant reporting strategy, meaning that its individually optimal strategy does not depend on the strategy of the other node. These dominant strategies are generally not truthful. At the resulting dominant-strategy Nash equilibrium, we show that the expected social cost is (often considerably) higher than that achieved when both nodes are completely truthful. Nonetheless, we prove that these equilibrium reporting strategies are never perverse, meaning that their resulting social cost is never worse than if traffic were uninformed as to network state.