Inter-domain Routing Stability Dynamics During Infrastructure Stress Events: The Internet Worm Menace

The Internet is crucial to business, government, education and many other facets of society and its continuing scalability places serious challenges on the routing system's capability to produce a stable view of the overall network reachability. Several global-scale Internet failures driven by the uncontrollable spreading of self-propagating code exploiting homogeneous security vulnerabilities have led the popular press to predict the imminent death of the Internet. The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the frequency and virulence of such ”internet worm” out-breaks infecting hundreds of thousands of Internet hosts in a very short period and sometimes disrupting the connectivity of some large sections of the Internet with significant damages in network stability. Although the predicted Internet col-lapse has yet to materialize, further analysis of the behavior and characteristics of wide-area network dynamics during these events is critical for the evolution of the Internet, and there is considerable effort focused on developing technical means for detecting and containing worm infections before they can affect global network stability. The main focus of this work is the impact of worm spreading events on BGP inter-domain routing dynamics on time scales that are long enough to have the potential to increase route convergence times and impact the network behavior. Our analysis shows the direct correlation between observed instabilities and some worm attacks. We analyzed in detail the Internet infrastructure failure and pathological events that can be triggered by the abnormal traffic during the worm attack and how they can lead to global routing instability.

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