Towards enhancing the visual analysis of interdomain routing

Interdomain routing with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) plays a critical role in the Internet, determining paths that packets must traverse from a source to a destination. Due to its importance BGP also has a long history of prefix hijack attacks, whereby attackers cause the traffic to take incorrect routes, enabling traffic hijack, monitoring and modification by the attackers. Proposals for securing the protocol are adopted slowly or erroneous. Our goal is to create a novel visual analytics approach that facilitates easy and timely detection of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities both in BGP and in the secure proposals for BGP. This work initiates the analysis of the problem, the target users and state of the art approaches. We provide a comprehensive overview of the BGP threats and describe incidents that happened over the past years. The paper introduces two new user groups beside the network administrators, which should also be addressed in future approaches. It also contributes a survey about visual analysis of interdomain routing with BGP and secure proposals for BGP. The visualization approaches are rated and we derive seven key challenges that arise when following our roadmap for an enhanced visual analysis of interdomain routing.