The hidden mailman and his mailbag: Routing path analysis from a European perspective

The postal system is often used as an analogy when describing Internet routing. However, in addition to similarities, there are some significant differences. First, and most importantly, the Autonomous Systems (ASes) that operate the routers along the end-to-end path of a packet can often inspect and manipulate the packet and its content. Second, due to lack of secure routing mechanisms, packet paths can be diverted through additional non-trusted ASes. Although we often know the first network we connect through and the service that we access, we seldom know the networks that forward our packets. We can think of these networks as hidden mailmen. To better understand these networks and their potential access to information, we characterize the ASes along the paths of typical Internet packets between European example clients and the most popular web domains. We also identify ASes and countries with higher path coverage and investigate if there are differences in the HTTPS usage among paths that may take additional detours. Our results highlight the role played by North American (typically US-based) ASes and glean insights into how vulnerable the detoured traffic is to man-in-the-middle attacks compared to regular traffic.