Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole (Wired)

Wired covers a talk given at DefCon about vulnerabilities in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which is the protocol used to advertise routes for internet traffic. The attack can hijack packets bound for a particular IP address, then silently send them on to the proper destination—possibly after modifying them. "The issue exists because BGP's architecture is based on trust. To make it easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they're the quickest, most efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that when a router says it's the best path, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic."

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