SIDR                                                        D. McPherson
Internet-Draft                                            Verisign, Inc.
Intended status: Informational                                 S. Amante
Expires: June 21, 2013                      Level 3 Communications, Inc.
                                                            E. Osterweil
                                                          Verisign, Inc.
                                                       December 18, 2012


               Route Leaks & MITM Attacks Against BGPSEC
           <draft-grow-simple-leak-attack-bgpsec-no-help-00>

Abstract

   This document describes a very simple attack vector that illustrates
   how RPKI-enabled BGPSEC machinery as currently defined can be easily
   circumvented in order to launch a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack via
   BGP.  It is meant to serve as input to the IETF's Secure Inter-Domain
   Routing working group during routing security requirements
   discussions and subsequent specification.

Status of this Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
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   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
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   This Internet-Draft will expire on June 21, 2013.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
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   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect



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   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.


Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   2.  Discussion  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
   3.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   4.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
   6.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6




































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1.  Introduction

   This document describes a very simple attack vector that illustrates
   how RPKI-enabled BGPSEC [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] machinery, as
   currently defined, can be easily circumvented in order to launch a
   Man In The Middle (MITM) attack via BGP [RFC4271].  It is meant to
   serve as input to the IETF's SIDR Working Group during routing
   security requirements discussions and subsequent specification.

   This draft shows evidence that the attack vector described herein is
   extremely common, with over 9.6 million candidate instances being
   recorded since 2007.  As a result of this evidence (and additional
   contextual knowledge), the authors believe the capability to prevent
   leaks and MITM leak-attacks should be a first-order engineering
   objective in any secure routing architecture.

   While the formal definition of a route leak has proven elusive in the
   literature, their rampant occurrence and persistent operational
   threats have proven to be anything but elusive.  This document is
   intended to serve as an existence proof for this threat vector, and
   any supplementary formal models are left for future work.


2.  Discussion

   In order to understand how a MITM attack can be launched with this
   attack vector, assume a multi-homed Autonomous System (AS), AS1,
   connects to two ISPs (ISP1 & ISP2), and wishes to insert themselves
   in the data-path between a target network (prefix P) connected to
   ISP2 and systems in ISP1's network in order to launch a Man In The
   Middle (MITM) attack.  Further, assume that an RPKI-enabled BGPSEC
   [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] as currently defined is fully
   deployed by all parties in this scenario and functioning as designed.



                +------+        +------+
                | ISP1 |        | ISP2 |_
                +------+        +------  \
                     \         /    (  P  )
                      \       /      \___/
                       +-----+
                       | AS1 |
                       +-----+


   This figure depicts a multi-homed AS1, who is connected to two
   upstream ISPs (ISP1 and ISP2).



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   Network operators on the Internet today typically prefer customer
   routes over routes learned from bi-lateral or settlement free peers.
   Network operators commonly accomplish this via application of one or
   more BGP [RFC4271] Path Attributes, most commonly, LOCAL_PREF as
   illustrated in [RFC1998], that are evaluated earlier in the BGP Path
   Selection process than AS_PATH length.

   As currently defined, [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] only provides
   two functions:

   1.  Is an Autonomous System authorized to originate an IP prefix?
   2.  Is the AS_PATH (or any similarly derived attribute such as
       BGPSEC_Path) in the route the same as the list of ASes through
       which the NLRI traveled?

   In order for an attacker (AS1) to divert traffic from ISP1 for prefix
   P through their AS they simply fail to scope the propagation of the
   target prefix P (received from ISP2) by announcing a (syntactically
   correct) BGPSEC update for prefix P to ISP1.  This vulnerability is
   what the authors refer to as a 'route leak' or a 'leak-attack' (when
   intent aligns with actions).  It is important to note that the
   default behavior in BGP [RFC4271] is to announce all best paths to
   external BGP peers, unless explicitly scoped by a BGP speaker through
   configuration.  Because ISP1 prefers prefixes learned from customers
   (AS1) over prefixes learned from peers (ISP2), they begin forwarding
   traffic for prefix P destinations through the attacker's AS (AS1).
   Voila!

   It is important to note that the route leaks described herein are NOT
   'misorginiations.'  Rather, these are cases in which routes are
   propagated with their authentic origins, but are misdirected through
   unexpected intermediaries.

   It should be understood that any multi-homed AS can potentially
   launch such an attack, even if through simple misconfiguration, as is
   a common occurrence today on the Internet.  As a matter of fact,
   advertising these prefixes is the default behavior is many BGP
   implementations, and explicit action must be taken to not advertise
   all prefixes learned in BGP.  Such occurrences have been historically
   archived [ROUTE_LEAK_DETECTION_TOOL] and presented to the operational
   community [NANOG_LEAK_TALK] since 2007.  To date, over 9.6 million
   such events have been recorded and are queriable
   [ROUTE_LEAK_DETECTION_TOOL].  This corpus serves as a low pass
   filter, and likely contains some degree of false positives.  Thus,
   while some may debate how many of the occurrences were malicious, or
   how many were actually real leaks, the corpus itself (and its sheer
   size) serves as evidence of the large magnitude of this problem.
   Determination of benign versus malicious intent in these situations



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   is usually imperceptible, and as such, preventative controls are
   requisite.

   To illustrate the above point, consider the events that transpired on
   November 6th, 2012 [LEAK_ATTACK_ON_GOOGLE].  On that day a large
   Internet property (who services hundreds of billions of public end
   user transactions every day) became unreachable for roughly 27
   minutes.  At a transaction volume like that, an outage of 27 minutes
   is a very visible (and likely financially measurable) event.  In this
   case, services became unreachable because a peered AS improperly
   propagated the impacted party's AS' prefix(s).  In leaks such as
   this, there exists public acknowledgment by the impacted party that
   [RFC6480] and [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] would be unable to
   detect or remediate this attack.

   In an environment where [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] is fully
   deployed, it is expected that there would be high assurances that
   guard the syntactic integrity of the AS_PATH (or BGPSEC_Path)
   attribute.  As such, one would expect that such an attribute would,
   indeed, accurately reflect the attacker's AS number in the
   appropriate location of the AS_PATH; however, it would not prevent an
   attacker from inserting his AS in the first place.  That is, nothing
   in [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol] would stop an attacker from
   launching this type of leak-attack.

   Discussion of out of band methods to mitigate this attack are beyond
   the scope of this document, as its objective is to inform routing
   protocol design choices currently being considered within the IETF's
   SIDR Working Group.


3.  Acknowledgements


4.  IANA Considerations


5.  Security Considerations

   This document describes an attack on an RPKI-enabled BGPSEC and is
   meant to inform the IETF Secure Inter-Domain Routing working group on
   the vulnerability that exists as a result of "leaks" and attacks that
   conform to this type of behavior.

   The authors believe the capability to prevent leaks and leak-attacks
   should be a first-order engineering objective in any secure routing
   architecture.




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6.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol]
              Lepinski, M., "BGPSEC Protocol Specification",
              draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol-06 (work in progress),
              October 2012.

   [LEAK_ATTACK_ON_GOOGLE]
              CloudFlare, CF., "Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit
              about How the Internet Works", November 2012, <http://
              blog.cloudflare.com/
              why-google-went-offline-today-and-a-bit-about>.

   [NANOG_LEAK_TALK]
              Mauch, J., "Detecting Routing Leaks by Counting",
              October 2007, <http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog41/
              presentations/mauch-lightning.pdf>.

   [RFC1998]  Chen, E. and T. Bates, "An Application of the BGP
              Community Attribute in Multi-home Routing", RFC 1998,
              August 1996.

   [RFC4271]  Rekhter, Y., Li, T., and S. Hares, "A Border Gateway
              Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271, January 2006.

   [RFC6480]  Lepinski, M. and S. Kent, "An Infrastructure to Support
              Secure Internet Routing", RFC 6480, February 2012.

   [ROUTE_LEAK_DETECTION_TOOL]
              Mauch, J., "BGP Routing Leak Detection System Routing Leak
              Detection System", September 2007,
              <http://puck.nether.net/bgp/leakinfo.cgi>.


Authors' Addresses

   Danny McPherson
   Verisign, Inc.
   12061 Bluemont Way
   Reston, VA  20190
   USA

   Phone: +1 703.948.3200
   Email: dmcpherson@verisign.com







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   Shane Amante
   Level 3 Communications, Inc.
   1025 Eldorado Boulevard
   Broomfield, CO  80021
   US

   Phone: +1 720.888.1000
   Email: shane@level3.net


   Eric Osterweil
   Verisign, Inc.
   12061 Bluemont Way
   Reston, VA  20190
   USA

   Email: eosterweil@verisign.com


































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