Characterizing the Impact of DDoS Attack on Inter-domain Routing System: A Case Study of the Dyn Cyberattack
Yujing Liu, Zhilin Wang, Nan Li · Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Computer Science, Electronics and Communication Engineering (CSECE 2018) · 2018
The inter-domain routing protocol BGP is sensitive to severe network congestion.In order to study the reliability of BGP under stress, we take the Dyn cyberattack on October 21 st , 2016 as a study case to characterize the impact of DDoS attack on inter-domain routing system.We propose several metrics including number of BGP updates, reachability, and variance of AS link betweenness centrality to measure the reachability and stability of the Internet.After performing a thorough analysis based on publicly available BGP data, we obtain key insights about the event.Firstly, the attack affects the reachability from the inter-domain routing perspective, but the effect is very small.Secondly, during the attack, the Internet experiences an unstable routing state in terms of a surge of BGP updates and changes of AS links' betweenness centrality.Finally, route flapping doesn't happen, probably because of anycast routing technique employed by Dyn, balancing high volume of traffic among multiple data centers instead of converging in one single link.