NEMECIS: A Tool for Validating and Safeguarding BGP
The robustness of the Internet relies heavily on the robustness of BGP routing. BGP is the glue that holds the Internet together: it is the common language of the routers that interconnect networks or Autonomous Systems(AS). The robustness of BGP and our ability to manage it effectively is hampered by the limited global knowledge and lack of coordination between Autonomous Systems. One of the few efforts to develop a globally analyzable and secure Internet is the creation of the Internet Routing Registries (IRRs). IRRs provide a voluntary detailed repository of BGP information. The IRR effort has not reached its full potential because of two reasons: a) extracting useful information is far from trivial, and b) its accuracy of the data is uncertain.
In this work, we develop a tool and a methodology to extract and infer information from IRR and validate it against BGP routing tables. In addition, using our tool, we quantify the accuracy of the information of IRR. We find that IRR has a lot of inaccuracies, but also contains significant and unique information. Finally, we show that our tool can identify and extract the correct information from IRR discarding erroneous data. We argue that our methodology and tool close the gap in the IRR vision for an analyzable Internet repository at the BGP level.
Bio
Michalis Faloutsos is a faculty member at the CS Dept in UC Riverside. He received his bachelor's degree at the National Technical University of Athens and his M.Sc and Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. His interests include, Internet protocols and measurements, BGP, multicasting, and ad-hoc networks. With his two brothers, he co-authored the widely-cited paper on powerlaws of the Internet topology (SIGCOMM'99). He is among the 5000 most cited computer scientists according to the digital library of citeseer. His research is supported by an NSF CAREER award, two DARPA awards, and grants from AT&T and Tata Consultancy Services. He is actively involved in the community as a reviewer and a TPC member in many conferences and journals.
Georgos Siganos received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1999) from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. Since 1999, he is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science and Engineering at the UC Riverside. His main research interests are in the areas of Internet topology and inter-domain routing. Currently, his main focus is on how to manage BGP information and how to improve the coordination among Internet service providers. Georgos is the developer of the NEMECIS framework and tool.
