Analysis of BGP Update Surge during Slammer Worm Attack

Mohit Lad, Xiaoliang Zhao, Beichuan Zhang, Dan Massey, Lixia Zhang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

16 Scopus citations

Abstract

Although the Internet routing infrastructure was not a direct target of the January 2003 Slammer worm attack, the worm attack coincided in time with a large, globally observed increase in the number of BGP routing update messages. Our analysis shows that the current global routing protocol BGP allows local connectivity dynamics to propagate globally. As a result, any small number of edge networks can potentially cause wide-scale routing overload. For example, two small edges ASes, which announced less than 0.25% of BGP routing table entries, contributed over 6% of total update messages observed at monitoring points during the worm attack. Although BGP route flap damping has been proposed to eliminate such undesirable global consequences of edge instability, our analysis shows that damping has not been fully deployed even within the Internet core. Our simulation further reveals that partial deployment of BGP damping not only has limited effect, but may also worsen the routing performance under certain topological conditions. The results show that it remains a research challenge to design a routing protocol that can prevent local dynamics from triggering global messages in order to scale well in a large, dynamic environment.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)66-79
Number of pages14
JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume2918
StatePublished - 2004
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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