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IMC '05, 2005 Internet Measurement Conference — Abstract
Pp. 385–390 of the Proceedings
Flooding Attacks by Exploiting Persistent Forwarding Loops
Jianhong Xia, Lixin Gao, and Teng Fei, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Abstract
In this paper, we present flooding attacks that exploit routing
anomalies in the Internet. In particular, we focus on routing
anomalies introduced by persistent forwarding loops. Persistent
forwarding loops may share one or more links with forwarding paths
to reachable addresses. An attacker can exploit persistent
forwarding loops to overload the shared links to disrupt the
Internet connectivity to those reachable addresses.
To understand the extent of this vulnerability, we perform extensive
measurements to systematically study persistent forwarding loops and
the number of network addresses that can be affected. We find that
persistent forwarding loops do exist in the current Internet. About
.2% of routable addresses experience persistent forwarding loops
and .21% of routable addresses can be attacked by exploiting
persistent forwarding loops. In addition, 85.16% of the
persistent forwarding loops appear within destination domains and
they can be observed from various locations, which makes it possible
to launch attacks from many vantage points. We also find that most
persistent forwarding loops are just two hops long, which enables an
attacker to amplify traffic to persistent forwarding loops
significantly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study
of exploiting the vulnerability of persistent forwarding loops to
launch DDoS attacks.
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