skip to main content
10.1145/3065913.3065922acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageseurosysConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Internet Kill Switches Demystified

Published: 23 April 2017 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • Abstract

    Internet kill switches are possible in today's Internet, but to date have been locally-scoped and self-inflicted. As more networks move towards centralized key architectures such as DNSSEC and BGPsec, adversarial kill switches become more powerful. We analyze the feasibility of and mechanisms for executing kill switches on remote DNSSEC- or BGPsec-enabled networks, finding that kill switches must be considered in the design of next generation Internet protocols. We also describe recovery procedures and properties intended to evaluate kill switch events, finding that recovering from a compromised key may take up to 48 hours.

    References

    [1]
    A. Alsaid and C. J. Mitchell. Revised Selected Papers of EuroPKI 2005, pages 227--239. Springer, 2005.
    [2]
    APNIC. Use of dnssec validation for world. http://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec/XA?c=XA&x=1&g=1&r=1&w=7&g=0.
    [3]
    R. Arends et al. DNS Security Introduction and Requirements. RFC 4033 (Proposed Standard), 2005.
    [4]
    ARIN. ARIN CPS for resource certification. https://www.arin.net/resources/rpki/cps.pdf, 2012.
    [5]
    S. Ariyapperuma and C. J. Mitchell. Security vulnerabilities in DNS and DNSSEC. In ARES, 2007.
    [6]
    R. Bush. Origin Validation Operation Based on the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). RFC 7115 (Best Current Practice), 2014.
    [7]
    D. Conrad. Ksk rollover operations begin. https://www.icann.org/news/blog/ksk-rollover-operations-begin, 2016.
    [8]
    D. Cooper, E. Heilman, K. Brogle, L. Reyzin, and S. Goldberg. On the risk of misbehaving RPKI authorities. In ACM HotNets, 2013.
    [9]
    A. Dainotti et al. Analysis of country-wide internet outages caused by censorship. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2011.
    [10]
    S. Farrell and H. Tschofenig. Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack. RFC 7258 (Best Current Practice), 2014.
    [11]
    S. Goldberg. Why is it taking so long to secure internet routing? Communications of the ACM, 57(10):56--63, 2014.
    [12]
    G. Greenwald. No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US surveillance state. Macmillan, 2014.
    [13]
    P. Gutmann. PKI: It's Not Dead, Just Resting. IEEE Computer, 35(8):41--49, 2002.
    [14]
    ICANN. TLD DNSSEC report. http://stats.research.icann.org/dns/tld_report/.
    [15]
    ICANN. Trusted community representatives -- proposed approach to root key management. http://www.root-dnssec.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/ICANN-TCR-Proposal-20100408.pdf, 2010.
    [16]
    S. Kent and A. Chi. Threat Model for BGP Path Security. RFC 7132 (Informational), 2014.
    [17]
    B. Laurie. Certificate Transparency. ACM Queue, 12(8), 2014.
    [18]
    M. Lepinski and S. Kent. An Infrastructure to Support Secure Internet Routing. RFC 6480 (Informational), 2012.
    [19]
    Q. Li, Y.-C. Hu, and X. Zhang. Even rockets cannot make pigs fly sustainably: Can BGP be secured with BGPsec? In NDSS Workshop on Security of Emerging Networking Technologies (SENT), 2014.
    [20]
    W. Lian, E. Rescorla, H. Shacham, and S. Savage. Measuring the Practical Impact of DNSSEC Deployment. In USENIX Security, 2013.
    [21]
    F. Ljunggren, T. Okubo, R. Lamb, and J. Schlyter. DNSSEC practice statement for the root zone KSK operator. https://www.iana.org/dnssec/icann-dps.txt, 2010.
    [22]
    F. Ljunggren, T. Okubo, R. Lamb, and J. Schlyter. DNSSEC practice statement for the root zone ZSK operator. http://www.root-dnssec.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/vrsn-dps-00.txt, 2010.
    [23]
    A. Mamiit. FBI searches for suspects in new fiber optics cable attack in California. https://perma.cc/S7V7-QZGG, 2015.
    [24]
    S. Morris, J. Ihren, J. Dickinson, and W. Mekking. DNSSEC Key Rollover Timing Considerations. RFC 7583 (Informational), 2015.
    [25]
    NIST. Global prefix/origin validation using RPKI. http://rpki-monitor.antd.nist.gov/.
    [26]
    RIPE. RIPE NCC RPKI CPS. https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-549, 2012.
    [27]
    Y. Song, A. Venkataramani, and L. Gao. Identifying and addressing protocol manipulation attacks in" secure" bgp. In IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2013.
    [28]
    K. Sriram and M. Lepinski. BGPsec Protocol Specification. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-sidr-bgpsec-protocol-15, 2016.
    [29]
    M. StJohns. Automated Updates of DNS Security (DNSSEC) Trust Anchors. RFC 5011 (Internet Standard), 2007.
    [30]
    R. van Rigswijk-Deij, A. Sperotto, and A. Pras. DNSSEC and its potential for DDoS attacks: a comprehensive measurement study. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), 2014.
    [31]
    X. Xu, Z. M. Mao, and J. A. Halderman. Internet censorship in China: Where does the filtering occur? In PAM, 2011.
    [32]
    D. Zhang, D. K. Gillmor, D. He, B. Sarikaya, and N. Kong. Certificate transparency for domain name system security extensions. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zhang-trans-ct-dnssec-03, 2016.

    Cited By

    View all

    Index Terms

    1. Internet Kill Switches Demystified

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image ACM Conferences
        EuroSec'17: Proceedings of the 10th European Workshop on Systems Security
        April 2017
        65 pages
        ISBN:9781450349352
        DOI:10.1145/3065913
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

        Sponsors

        Publisher

        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        Published: 23 April 2017

        Permissions

        Request permissions for this article.

        Check for updates

        Author Tags

        1. BGPsec
        2. Centralized key architectures
        3. DNSSEC
        4. Kill switches

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article
        • Research
        • Refereed limited

        Funding Sources

        • European Research Council
        • Institute for Information & Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP)

        Conference

        EuroSys '17
        Sponsor:
        EuroSys '17: Twelfth EuroSys Conference 2017
        April 23 - 26, 2017
        Belgrade, Serbia

        Acceptance Rates

        EuroSec'17 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 24 submissions, 42%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 113 submissions, 42%

        Upcoming Conference

        EuroSys '25
        Twentieth European Conference on Computer Systems
        March 30 - April 3, 2025
        Rotterdam , Netherlands

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • Downloads (Last 12 months)24
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        Cited By

        View all
        • (2023)IsaNet: A framework for verifying secure data plane protocolsJournal of Computer Security10.3233/JCS-22002131:3(217-259)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
        • (2023)Key ManagementTrends in Data Protection and Encryption Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-33386-6_4(15-20)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2023
        • (2021)DIIASecurity and Communication Networks10.1155/2021/19744932021Online publication date: 1-Jan-2021
        • (2021)Formal Verification of Secure Forwarding Protocols2021 IEEE 34th Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)10.1109/CSF51468.2021.00018(1-16)Online publication date: Jun-2021

        View Options

        Get Access

        Login options

        View options

        PDF

        View or Download as a PDF file.

        PDF

        eReader

        View online with eReader.

        eReader

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media