Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the fabric of routing on the Internet today, with a approximately half a million routes between 50,000 autonomous systems. Sounds like a ripe target for malicious parties to exploit, which is the gist of today's trio of Black Hat Briefing highlights.
To hear Wim Remes tell it, the underbelly of the Internet has been in a precarious condition for a while now. BGP routing leaks occur on a regular basis, slowly eroding our trust in the infrastructure. In Internet Plumbing for Security Professionals: The State of BGP Security, Remes will investigate the current state of BGP, with an emphasis on practical countermeasures to address such problems and re-instill that sense of trust.
Along similar lines, people are used to believing that BGP hijacking isn't a huge issue, as HTTPS and other encryption methods should protect any important data that leaks. But Internet routing was designed to be a conversation between trusted parties. Now it isn't, though it still behaves like it is. The problem is that the encryption is backed by SSL/TLS PKI, which itself trusts Internet routing. Breaking HTTPS with BGP Hijacking will demonstrate a novel new method to exploit that trust, as well as how to prevent it from happening.
Lastly, a typical day sees thousands of BGP changes, and though the vast majority are simply planned routing changes, configuration updates, and network additions, some signals in the noise can be detected as nefarious, from government-sponsored regimes taking entire countries offline to criminals routing traffic for profit. BGPmon has long been operating a network of BGP probes, classifiers, and associated alerts on these changes, and at Black Hat will debut BGP Stream, an always-on Twitter account announacing all detected, potentially malicious BGP/ASN data.
Black Hat USA 2015 will occur at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. It goes down August 1-6, so be sure to register to lock in your attendance.