On the Safety and Security of Path Splicing: A Case Study for Path Splicing on the GEANT Network

Path splicing is a proposed routing architecture for the Internet in which end-hosts could change the path their traffic uses by changing a number of bits in the packet header. Path splicing improves the reliability of the network against link failures since it ensures that physically connected links can be discovered and used. To that end, this paper studies the performance of path splicing in non-adversarial and adversarial environments. In a non-adversarial setting, we investigate the implications behind giving the end-hosts the power to select routes in the absence/presence of errors in the probing mechanisms they are employing to infer the state of the network. In an adversarial setting, we examine the extent to which attackers can exploit path splicing to mount attacks that cause a series of route changes by end-hosts in searching for better paths. Our results are derived from real traffic matrices obtained from the GEANT network.