nanog mailing list archives

Re: [renesys] The New Threat: Targeted Internet Traffic Misdirection


From: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 23:03:37 -0500

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Christopher Morrow
<morrowc.lists () gmail com> wrote:
first, awesome, thanks...

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer () nic fr> wrote:
<snip>
  68.164.80.0/20
  68.164.96.0/21
  68.164.126.0/23
  68.164.160.0/21
  68.164.192.0/21
  68.164.208.0/23

These addresses have no relationship with Iceland so we can say it's a
hijacking. But do note there is no AS prepending in the announce (the
trick described by Kapela & PIlosov to create a clean return path).

yea.. so this smells, to me, like a leak from a 'route optomization'
box (netvmg or whatever they eventually became). These are all pretty

So, I was thinking over dinner that there's a simpler explanation
(that fails if this was a more full-table-ish leak) that the Icelandic
provider could have done something like putting external-bgp data into
their IGP then pulling back out to bgp ... which is a lot more like
AS7007-like problems than netvmg-like problems.

I would expect that ospf/isis would barf with ~400k paths though, so
i'm still betting on netvmg-ish issues.

small prefixes and there are covering routes for these as well: (for
one: 68.164.24.0/21  - from the RV data)

18566   | 68.164.0.0/14       | MEGAPATH5-US - MegaPath Corporation
18566   | 68.164.24.0/21      | MEGAPATH5-US - MegaPath Corporation


so... err... potentially:
  1) route-optomization-box sends routes into iBGP with local origin-as
  2) routes aren't properly managed (community/etc) from local ISP ->
transits/peers
  3) peers/transits didn't filter (some of them did apparently)
  4) routes make it into the larger DFZ (or parts of the dfz at least, clearly)

Traffic comes to 68.164.24.1 along a 'false path' in the dfz, in to
the icelandic ISP and follows the iBGP learned path exiting
(fortunately) out the isp that filtered...

I'm sure you could construct lots of other pathological cases, but
this seems plausible enough to me...

Finding the other announces in RouteViews is left as an exercice
(hint: use a RouteViews collector close from the announce, here in
England, because the hijacking announce did not propagate everywhere).


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