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Network Heterogeneity and Cascading Failures: An Evaluation for the Case of BGP Vulnerability

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Published
Publication date2009
Host publicationIWSOS '09: Proceedings of the 4th IFIP TC 6 International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems
EditorsThrasyvoulos Spyropoulos, Karin Anna Hummel
Place of PublicationBerlin
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages207-212
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)978-3-642-10865-5
ISBN (print)978-3-642-10864-8
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer
Volume5918
ISSN (Print)0302-9743

Abstract

Large-scale outages of computer networks, particularly the Internet, can have a significant impact on their users and society in general. There have been a number of theoretical studies of complex network structures that suggest that heterogeneous networks, in terms of node connectivity and load, are more vulnerable to cascading failures than those which are more homogeneous. In this paper, we describe early research into an investigation of whether this thesis holds true for vulnerabilities in the Internet’s inter-domain routing protocol – BGP – in light of different network structures. Specifically, we are investigating the effects of BGP routers creating blackholes – observed phenomena in the Internet in recent years. We describe our evaluation setup, which includes a bespoke topology generator that can fluidly create any topology configuration from the current scale-free AS-level to the investigated homogeneous graphs. We find that network homogeneity as suggested by theory does not protect the overall network from failures in practice, but instead may even be harmful to network operations.