Team

Overview and Goals

Prefix hijacking is a common phenomenon in the Internet that often causes routing problems and economic losses [13]. ARTEMIS [1,10] is a tool, usable by network administrators, to detect in real-time and automatically mitigate prefix hijacking incidents against their own prefixes, employing self-monitoring on the AS level. ARTEMIS employs real-time monitoring of BGP data (e.g., BGP updates exported by route collectors) and can: (a) detect a prefix hijacking within a few seconds from its launch, and (b) completely mitigate the hijack within a few minutes (e.g., 2-5 minutes in the initial experiments with the PEERING testbed [2]). This fast response time enables legitimate ASes to quickly counter the hijack based on data they observe themselves on the control plane.

The goal of this project is to implement ARTEMIS as a multi-module application running on top of ONOS [9], using the prior work and code-base of the SDN-IP project [3,8], as well as testing the application over a real BGP testbed such as PEERING [2]. The final objective is to have an open-source implementation of ARTEMIS running on top of a popular production-grade Network Operating System. This implementation will then enable researchers and operators to test miscellaneous BGP prefix mitigation strategies over real-world testbeds and production networks, and extract results that are relevant to today’s ISP operations; such results would be otherwise not possible to produce.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of the BGP protocol and its best path selection algorithm is required in order to fully understand the concepts of ARTEMIS. However, every user can try the demo without this prior knowledge.

ARTEMIS Architecture and Functionality

Fig. 1: The ARTEMIS architecture.

ARTEMIS consists of three components: a monitoring (1), a detection (2) and a mitigation (3) service as shown in Fig. 1.

1) The monitoring service runs continuously and provides control plane information from the AS itself, the streaming services of RIPE RIS [4] and BGPstream [6] (from RIPE RIS and RouteViews), as well as BGPmon [5] and Periscope [7], which return almost real-time BGP updates for a given list of prefixes and ASNs.

2) The detection service combines the information from these sources; the minimum delay of the detection service is the delay for the first suspicious BGP update to arrive (from any source). ARTEMIS can be parameterized (e.g., selecting BGP monitors based on location and/or connectivity) to achieve tradeoffs between monitoring overhead and detection efficiency/speed.
 

3) When a prefix hijacking is detected, ARTEMIS automatically launches its mitigation service. Since in Internet routing the most specific prefix is always preferred, ARTEMIS modifies the BGP configuration of the routers so that they announce deaggregated sub-prefixes of the hijacked prefix (that are most preferred from any AS). After BGP converges, the hijacking attack is mitigated and traffic flows normally back to the ARTEMIS-protected AS (the one that runs ARTEMIS). Therefore, ARTEMIS assumes write permissions to the routers of the network, in order to be able to modify their BGP configuration and mitigate the attack. This can be effectively accomplished by running ARTEMIS as an application-level module, over a network controller that supports BGP, like ONOS [9].

Note: Prefix deaggregation is effective for hijacks of IP prefixes less specific than /24, but it might not work for /24 prefixes or more specifics. This is because BGP advertisements of more specific than /24 prefixes are typically filtered by many ISPs, since it is considered as best practice to avoid the exponential increase of the size of the BGP routing table. We plan to address this problem through future extensions of ARTEMIS (e.g., collaborative mitigation).

Future plans: Despite the fact that ARTEMIS was first tested in a non-SDN environment with the basic mitigation strategy of automatic prefix deaggregation in mind, it can support several extensions related to its monitoring, detection and mitigation mechanisms due to its modular design. These extensions, e.g., employing MOAS (Multi-Origin AS Announcements) and tunneling in order to steer the hijacked traffic back to its legitimate owner during the mitigation phase, will also be researched as extra modules built over the ONOS platform. In parallel to the mitigation, an additional monitoring service is envisioned to provide real-time information about the mitigation process. This service can also use data from Periscope, RIPE RIS, BGPstream and BGPmon to monitor/visualize the mitigation.

Demo Topology

Figures 2 and 3 show the topology that is setup via the topo.py file inside the tutorial folder (TODO: set exact location). The BGP speakers are Quagga routers and the route collector is an ExaBGP router running a custom script to replicate the behavior of a RIPE route collector.

 

                                                    Fig. 2: The conceptual demo topology.                                                                                                                           Fig. 3: The full emulated demo topology.                                      

• AS65001
  Intermediate AS that consists of a BGP speaker (R1), a L2 switch, a host (H1) and an ExaBGP Route Collector (RC).

• R1: Announces 10.0.0.0/8 and is a neighbor of AS65003 and AS65002. Also, it has the exaBGP RC as an iBGP neighbor and propagates BGP update messages to it.

• ExaBGP RC: RC connected to R1 but also to the ONOS controller on the protected AS (in real world this connection is done through the underlying network; the only limitation is that the IP endpoint of ONOS should have a non-hijacked IP address so that the monitor can reach ONOS during the hijack).

• H1 / 10.0.0.100: Host which is going to be communicating with the host inside the protected AS. It is used to provide us a visualization of the data-plane behavior when the BGP hijack occurs.

• AS65002
  Intermediate AS that consists of a BGP speaker (R2) that announces 20.0.0.0/8 and its purpose is to add an additional hop to the AS-PATH so that the protected AS can be hijacked. Although in the demo the attacker announces the exact prefix that belongs to the protected AS and not a more specific one, due to the shortest path attribute of the BGP best path selection algorithm, is able to steal the traffic.
  
  

• AS65003
  Hijacker AS that consists of a BGP speaker (R3).

• R3: By announcing the prefix of the protected AS (40.0.0.0/8) from this BGP speaker, we trigger a BGP hijack, and all traffic generated from AS65001 and directed towards AS65004, will be redirected to the network of AS65003.
  
  

• AS65004
  Protected AS that is employing ONOS. It consists of a BGP speaker, an OVS switch, a host and the ONOS instance.

• R4: BGP speaker announcing 40.0.0.0/8. It is connected with his neighbor through the OVS switch which is configured by the SDN-IP application to talk with the BGP speaker of AS65002.

• OVS: Talks with ONOS on a management interface via 192.168.0.0/24.

• ONOS: ONOS is connected with the BGP speaker to retrieve the BGP routing table. Also, it receives the BGP update messages from the ExaBGP router. Also, it has a link with the OVS switch in order to interact with the data plane.

• H4 / 40.0.0.100: Host that receives traffic with the help of the reactive-routing application from the host in AS65001.

JSON Configuration File

The JSON Configuration File is the file that contains the required configuration entries to monitor prefixes and check the validity of neighbors and paths. The following code block shows an example of the JSON configuration format for ARTEMIS which is used in the Demo Topology.

"org.onosproject.artemis" : {
	"artemis" : {
    	"prefixes" : [ 
        	{
            	"prefix" : "40.0.0.0/8",
                "paths" : [ 
                	{
                    	"origin" : 65004,
                        "neighbor" : [
                        	{
                            	"asn" : 65002,
                                "neighbor": [ 65001 ]
                            }
                        ]
                    }
                ],
                "moas" : [ ]
            }
        ],
        "frequency" : 3000,
        "monitors" : {origin
        	"ripe" : [ ],
        	"exabgp": [ "192.168.1.2:5000" ]
        }
    }
}

Explanation of Fields

• prefixes: List consisting of prefixes with their AS-PATH information and (optionally) legitimate MOAS ASes.

• prefix: a CIDR representation of the prefix that is monitored/protected.

• paths: a list of dictionaries that contain the ASN of the protected AS (origin), along with a list of dictionaries for the neighbors.

• neighbor: list of dictionaries that contain each neighbor's ASN and a list of ASNs for the neighbor's neighbor.
  For example, in the demo topology the protected (origin) AS65004 sees the AS65002 as a first-hop neighbor, and AS65001 as a second-hop neighbor (resulting in the legitimate announced path AS65004 - AS65002 - AS65001).
  Note: While the operator can supply the origin and first-hop neighbor ASNs as ground-truth in the configuration, the N-hop (N > 1) neighbor information is planned to be generated automatically by ARTEMIS in future versions of the tool, based on the received BGP updates.
  

• moas: *in-progress*

• frequency: Polling interval in milliseconds for the detection mechanism to check batches of BGP update messages (stored in the application cache). In the demo configuration file, it is set to check every 3s (3000ms).

• monitors: List of the route collectors that ARTEMIS is using for monitoring. Currently it supports RIPE and ExaBGP route collectors through the socket-io interface, and is extendable to include more monitoring services/APIs.

• RIPE Route Collectors have specific identifiers ("rrc17", "rrc18", "rrc19", "rrc20"). You can configure them following this example: "ripe" : ["rrc17", "rrc19"]

• An ExaBGP Route Collector (RC) is implemented inside the tutorial folder (TODO: set exact location). You can host such an RC locally by running an ExaBGP instance with the exabgp.conf and server.py files provided (will require modifications in directory paths). In the demo topology we have an ExaBGP speaker running on 192.168.1.2:5000, monitoring the BGP control plane from the perspective of AS65001.

Note: The demo configuration also includes entries for the SDN-IP and the Reactive-Routing application (separate step, not shown in this demo). It specifies where the BGP speaker is located and which are the local prefixes.

Running the Demo

Install the ExaBGP Python library by doing these steps: 

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp
$ cd exabgp; git checkout 3.4
$ echo 'export PATH=$PATH:~/exabgp/sbin' >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

Install the Quagga software routing suite through apt-get:

$ sudo apt-get install quagga -y

Download and install the mininet emulation platform:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/mininet/mininet
$ cd mininet; git checkout 2.2.2
$ ./util/install.sh -fnv

Install java 8 (needed by ONOS in the next steps):

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common -y && \
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -y && \
sudo apt-get update && \
echo "oracle-java8-installer shared/accepted-oracle-license-v1-1 select true" | sudo debconf-set-selections && \
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default -y

Download ONOS from GitHub and add the bash profile:

$ cd ~
$ git clone https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/onos.git
$ echo '. ~/onos/tools/dev/bash_profile' >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

Install pip3, Python packages and set the configuration used by ExaBGP: 

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip -y
$ sudo pip3 install -r ~/onos/tools/tutorials/artemis/requirements.txt
$ nano ~/onos/tools/tutorials/artemis/configs/exabgp.conf (you must put the absolute path at run command, e.g., /home/onos/onos/tools/tutorials/artemis/server.py)

Run ONOS (first time will take some time):

$ buck run onos-local -- clean

When ONOS is loaded run the mininet topology:

$ cd /onos/tools/tutorials/artemis
$ sudo ./topo.py

Note: If you are using a GUI version of Ubuntu, you should disable networking by unchecking it in the relevant menu, in order to avoid interfaces swapping IP addresses!
Pass the network configuration with onos-netcfg and login to the onos CLI:

$ onos-netcfg localhost ~/onos/tools/tutorials/artemis/configs/network-cfg.json
$ onos localhost

Run artemis inside the ONOS CLI (requires reactive-routing as a prerequisite application):

onos> app activate org.onosproject.reactive-routing
onos> app activate org.onosproject.artemis

Check if bgp-routes are complete (should include 10.0.0.0/8, 20.0.0.0/8, 30.0.0.0/8 and 40.0.0.0/8; if not you should restart the topology. It takes some time (~1-2min)):

ONOS> bgp-routes

Now that the topology is running, through the mininet CLI you can connect to the hosts to check connectivity and also to the BGP speakers to modify the BGP control plane. To hijack the prefix of our protected AS:

1. Connect to the BGP speaker named R3: 

mininet> xterm R3 (opens a new window on R3 node)
R3> telnet localhost bgpd

2. Announce the prefix:

R3> sdnip (this is the password)
R3> enable
R3# configuration terminal
R3(conf)# router bgp 65003
R3(conf-bgp)# network 40.0.0.0/8

Now the hijacker will attract all the traffic from AS65001 (destined to 40.0.0.0/8); in parallel the ExaBGP speaker will send the BGP update of the hijack (among other updates) to the ONOS instance (running artemis) which is going to detect the hijack.

Inside the logs you will see that the attack is actually detected and the de-aggregation mechanism has successfully mitigated the attack (by announcing 40.0.0.0/9 and 40.128.0.0/9 from the BGP speaker of the protected AS).

After BGP converges and the control and data planes are consistent, the traffic of AS65001, destined to 40.0.0.0/8, returns to our protected AS.

Demo video

ONOS Technical Steering Team Presentation

Presentation Slides: https://goo.gl/UZREBe

References

[1] G. Chaviaras, P. Gigis, P. Sermpezis, and X. Dimitropoulos, “ARTEMIS: Real-Time Detection and Automatic Mitigation for BGP Prefix Hijacking (demo)”, in ACM SIGCOMM, 2016 (url: http://www.inspire.edu.gr/wp-content/pdfs/PavlosSIGCOMM2016.pdf)

[2] “About PEERING - The BGP Tetsbed”, https://peering.usc.edu/ 

[3] “SDN-IP”, https://wiki.onosproject.org/display/ONOS/SDN-IP

[4] “RIPE RIS - Streaming Service”, https://labs.ripe.net/Members/colin_petrie/updates-to-the-ripe-ncc-routing-information-service 

[5] “BGPmon”,  http://www.bgpmon.io 

[6] “BGPstream”, https://bgpstream.caida.org/  

[7] V. Giotsas, A. Dhamdhere, and K. Claffy, “Periscope: Unifying looking glass querying”, in Proc. PAM, 2016

[8] Lin, Pingping, et al., "Seamless interworking of SDN and IP", in ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. Vol. 43. No. 4. ACM, 2013.

[9] Berde, Gerola, et al. "ONOS: towards an open, distributed SDN OS", Proceedings of the third workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking, ACM, 2014.

[10] “ARTEMIS demo”, http://inspire.edu.gr/artemis

[11] “Mininet: An Instant Virtual Network on your Laptop (or other PC)“, http://mininet.org/ 

[12] “GNS3: The software that empowers network professionals”, https://www.gns3.com/ 

[13] “Hacker Redirects Traffic From 19 Internet Providers to Steal Bitcoins”, https://www.wired.com/2014/08/isp-bitcoin-theft/ 

[14] “Internet Security Privacy and Intelligence Research Group”, http://www.inspire.edu.gr/