Interception in distance-vector routing networks

Despite the large effort devoted to cybersecurity research over the last decades, cyber intrusions and attacks are still increasing. With respect to routing networks, route hijacking has highlighted the need to reexamine the existing protocols that govern traffic routing. In particular, our primary question is how the topology of a network affects the susceptibility of a routing protocol to endogenous route misdirection. In this article we define and analyse an abstract model of traffic interception (i.e. eavesdropping) in distance-vector routing networks. Specifically, we study algorithms that measure the potential of groups of dishonest agents to divert traffic through their infrastructure under the constraint that messages must reach their intended destinations. We relate two variants of our model based on the allowed kinds of lies, define strategies for colluding agents and prove optimality in special cases. In our main theorem we derive a provably optimal monitoring strategy for subsets of agents in which no two are adjacent, and we extend this strategy to the general case. Finally, we use our results to analyse the susceptibility of real and synthetic networks to endogenous traffic interception. In the Autonomous Systems (AS) graph of the United States, we show that compromising only 18 random nodes in the AS graph surprisingly captures 10% of all traffic paths in the network in expectation when a distance-vector routing protocol is in use.