Progressive Visual Analysis of Interdomain Routing Data

The foundation of the Internet today is based on interdomain routing, in particular on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). However, with the frequent use of the Internet, the associated routing information is also increasing daily. The flood of information makes it increasingly difficult to keep track of the entire network. Further approaches are therefore necessary to manage the accumulating data volumes. Visual analytics techniques are good way to tackle this problem. This facilitates the analysis of routing information in order to detect routing misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. Since previous tools have limited scalability to analyze large amounts of data, I have designed and implemented a web-based progressive approach for the visual-interactive analysis of BGP updates. It uses methods from information visualisation and visual analytics to make routing information more accessible for analysis. The visual interface provides multiple visualisations of different attributes of BGP updates. It also allows interaction with the interface to filter relevant data. The evaluation of the prototype was conducted with two experts in the BGP field and revealed that the interface provides a good basis for future developments.