An Internet-Scale Feasibility Study of BGP Poisoning as a Security Primitive

The relative success or failure in practice of a range of censorship-circumvention, DDoS defense, and congestion discovery systems depend on BGP poisoning's feasibility or impracticality. Using a purpose-built Internet-scale measurement system spanning 5 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routers, 8 previously unused IP prefixes, 5,000 distinct vantage points, and 3 countries, we capture and analyze 1,460 instances of BGP poisoning across 3% of Autonomous Systems (ASes) on the Internet. We measure the Internet's response to the underlying routing behaviors necessary for widespread success of BGP poisoning, and we then re-evaluate several existing systems using our findings. We highlight how these findings impact both existing and future security systems and techniques, and additionally build models that indicate how well certain ASes on the Internet can execute BGP poisoning effectively. Fundamentally, we address the growing division between security literature that assume active re-routing of traffic with BGP poisoning is possible versus work that assumes the opposite, providing insight for future Internet security research as well as validating prior work's reproducibility.