Classifying and Identifying BGP Hijacking attacks on the internet

The Internet is a large network of globally interconnected devices p used to facilitate the exchange of information across different parties. As usage of the Internet is expected to grow in the future, the underlying infrastructure must be secure to ensure traffic reaches its intended destination without any disruptions. However, the primary routing protocol used on the Internet, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), while scalable and can properly route traffic between large networks, does not inherently have any security mechanisms built within the protocol. This leads to devices that use BGP over the internet to be susceptible to BGP Hijacking attacks, which involve maliciously injected routes into BGP’s Routing Information Base (RIB) to intentionally redirect traffic to another destination. Attempts to solve these issues in the past have been challenging due to the prevalence of devices that use BGP on the existing Internet infrastructure and the lack of backward compatibility for proposed solutions. The goal of this research is to categorize the different types of BGP Hijacking attacks that are possible on a network, identify indicators that an ongoing BGP Hijacking attack based on received routes from the Internet locally without access to machines from other locations or networks, and subsequently leverage these indicators to protect local networks from external BGP Hijacking attacks.