BGP Anomaly Detection and Internet Routing Security
Summary
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) underpins the global routing system by exchanging reachability information among autonomous systems (ASes). Despite its centrality, BGP remains vulnerable to a range of anomalies—whether stemming from configuration errors, link failures or deliberate attacks such as prefix hijacking and route leaks. These incidents can divert or disrupt traffic, with potentially wide‐reaching consequences for network reliability and security. To address these threats, researchers have developed a spectrum of detection and mitigation strategies. Statistical approaches exploit patterns in update frequencies and burstiness, while machine learning models learn normal routing behaviour to flag deviations. Protocol‐level enhancements and cryptographic validations seek to authenticate origin information and preserve path integrity. Complementary efforts in monitoring and measurement aim to broaden visibility across the Internet’s topology, ensuring timely identification and remediation of incidents. Together, these advances contribute to a more resilient interdomain routing fabric capable of withstanding emerging threats.
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BGP Anomaly Detection and Internet Routing Security publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in bgp anomaly detection and internet routing security across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP): The principal interdomain routing protocol that distributes network reachability information among autonomous systems.
Autonomous System (AS): A network or group of networks under a single administrative entity exchanging routing information via BGP.
Prefix Hijacking: The unauthorized or erroneous advertisement of IP address blocks by an AS that does not legitimately control them.
Route Leak: The unintended propagation of valid routes beyond their intended administrative or policy scope due to configuration errors.
Anomaly Detection: Techniques used to identify deviations from normal BGP update patterns that may indicate failures or attacks.
Median Absolute Deviation (MAD): A robust statistical metric for measuring variability in BGP update frequencies to flag outliers.
Route Collector: A distributed monitoring infrastructure that gathers and archives BGP updates for analysis and security monitoring.
References
- Median Absolute Deviation for BGP Anomaly Detection. Future Internet (2024).
- Using bursty announcements for detecting BGP routing anomalies. Computer Networks (2021).
- On the Effectiveness of BGP Hijackers That Evade Public Route Collectors. IEEE Access (2023).
- Design and analysis of optimization algorithms to minimize cryptographic processing in BGP security protocols. Computer Communications (2017).
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