Towards Enhancing Inter-Domain Routing Security With Visualization and Visual Analytics

Abstract

In the complex landscape of the Internet, inter-domain routing systems are essential for ensuring seamless connectivity and reachability across autonomous systems. However, the lack of dependable security validation mechanisms in these systems poses persistent challenges. Vulnerabilities such as prefix hijacking, path forgery, and route leakage not only compromise network operators and users, but also threaten the stability and accessibility of the Internet’s core infrastructure. To address this, visualization and visual analytics techniques are adept at identifying and detecting security threats, offering network administrators effective methods to monitor and maintain network operations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art research in visualization and visual analytics for inter-domain routing security. We delineate four scenarios for tasks analysis in network visualization: monitoring, detection, verification, and discovery. Each category is explored in detail, focusing on the employed data sources and visualization techniques. Several key findings are presented at the end of each category, aimed at providing researchers and practitioners with research inspiration. Furthermore, we examine the trends of academic interest observed in recent decades and propose potential directions for future research in visual analytics pertaining to Internet infrastructure security.