How Can Multipath Dissemination Help to Detect Prefix Hijacking?

Multiple path dissemination is recognized as an important feature to improve the reliability and efficiency of networks. However, most multipath routing proposals focus only on disseminating additional routes to increase the reliability of the Internet, and do not concern the security issues that the additional routes bring to the table. In this paper, we attempt to understand the feasibility of utilizing multipath dissemination to detect prefix hijacking attacks. We investigate the minimum level of security enhancement that would be achieved by multipath dissemination. We systematically analyze the effectiveness of two types of multipath advertisements, advertising the most disjoint path advertisement or the second best path advertisement with the best path, on detecting prefix hijacking. Our analysis and measurement results show that advertising the second best route with the best route is an efficient and effective way to disseminate multipath information with respect to inter-domain routing security.