Analysis on the Effect of Prefix Hijacking Attack and Internet Hierarchy

The AS that hijacks a prefix can black hole and intercept all the hijacked traffic and thus, cause a denial-of-service attack or a man-in-the-middle attack against the prefix owner. There have been many incidents of IP prefix hijacking by BGP protocol in the Internet. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the impaction prefix hijacks launched at different position in the Internet hierarchy. The Internet is classified into three hierarchiescore layer, forwarding layer and marginal layer based on the power-law and commercial relations of autonomous systems (ASes). The impaction parameter, affected ASes set Nc, is analyzed for typical prefix hijacking events in different layers. The result shows that the hierarchical nature of network influences the prefix hijacking greatly.