An analysis on selective dropping attack in BGP

Previous studies show that current inter-domain routing protocol, border gateway protocol (BGP), is vulnerable to various attacks. Previously, the major concern about BGP security is that malicious BGP routers can arbitrarily falsify BGP routing messages and spread out incorrect routing information. However, one type of attack, which we term as the selective dropping attack, has been largely neglected in literatures. A selective dropping attack occurs when a malicious router intentionally drops incoming and outgoing UPDATE messages, which results in data traffic being blackholed or trapped in a loop. In this paper, we conduct a thorough analysis on this type of attack and advocate that new security countermeasures should be developed to detect and prevent such attack.