Secure Networking:: Detecting Malicious Routers

The Internet is not a safe place. Unsecured hosts canexpect to be compromised within minutes of connectingto the Internet. However, while such threats to hostsystems are widely understood, it is less wellappreciated that the network infrastructure itself issubject to constant attack as well. Indeed, throughcombinations of social engineering and exploitationof weak passwords, attackers have seized control overof thousands of routers. By compromising a router, anattacker may interpose on the traffic stream andmanipulate it maliciously to attack others:selectively dropping, modifying or re-routingpackets. This work is an important step in being ableto tolerate such attacks on key networkinfrastructure components. This book is based on theauthor''s doctoral research, which is recognized withthe William C. Carter Award, in 2005: "The award ispresented annually since 1997 to recognize anindividual who has made a significant contribution tothe field of dependable computing through his or hergraduate dissertation research. The award issponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee onFault-Tolerant Computing and the IFIP WG-10.4 onDependable Computing and Fault Tolerance."