Friday, August 29, 2008

Gaping hole opened in Internet's trust-based BGP protocol

My interest in BGP grows;

....Pilosov and Kapela, however, have found and demonstrated a way to intercept communication and then forward it back along to its original intended recipient. This is normally impossible; having established himself as the most direct router for a given address, any data the hijacker attempts to follow is promptly returned. Pilosov and Kapela bypass this issue by prepending the IP address they feed to certain routers. Prepending refers to attaching additional numbers to their own advertised route, in order to ensure that certain routers reject it. Once a router has rejected their address, the hacker feeds the data to be forwarded on to it. The data is processed and sent to where the router thinks it should go, which means it ends up forwarded on to its intended recipient.

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