SKWeak Attacks on Path Splicing: Vulnerability Assessment and Defense Mechanisms

Path splicing is a proposed routing architecture for the Internet in which end-hosts (and intermediate routers) are empowered to change the paths their traffic uses by modifying a number of bits in the packet headers. These bits allow intermediate routers to choose alternate paths from the shortest one. To that end, this paper exposes SKWeak (Selective K Weakest links) attacks that exploit the adaptive behavior of end-hosts, through attacking the K weakest links. We show that SKWeak attack can significantly increase the network overhead due to the use of non-optimal paths. Our results show a multiplicative factor of SKWeak attacks that are close to 700. We propose defense mechanisms that aim to limit the dynamics induced by preventing excessive splicing from end-hosts. Our assessment is conducted on the Sprint topology with synthetic traffic matrices.