Securing Internet Applications from Routing Attacks

Abstract: Attacks on Internet routing are typically viewed through the lens of availability and confidentiality, assuming an adversary that either discards traffic or performs eavesdropping. Yet, a strategic adversary can use routing attacks to compromise the security of critical Internet applications like Tor, certificate authorities, and the bitcoin network. In this paper, we survey such application-specific routing attacks and argue that both application-layer and network-layer defenses are essential and urgently needed. While application-layer defenses are easier to deploy in the short term, we hope that our work serves to provide much needed momentum for the deployment of network-layer defenses.