Nation-State Routing: Censorship, Wiretapping, and BGP

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing country-level Internet routing to understand how national policies influence global traffic flow and identify key countries affecting international reachability.

Contribution

It presents the first methodology to assess the impact of national policies on global BGP routing and traffic flow at the country level.

Findings

Iran and China have limited influence on interdomain routing.

The US, UK, and Germany are central to international reachability.

Some countries' policies could significantly impact global Internet traffic.

Abstract

The treatment of Internet traffic is increasingly affected by national policies that require the ISPs in a country to adopt common protocols or practices. Examples include government enforced censorship, wiretapping, and protocol deployment mandates for IPv6 and DNSSEC. If an entire nation's worth of ISPs apply common policies to Internet traffic, the global implications could be significant. For instance, how many countries rely on China or Great Britain (known traffic censors) to transit their traffic? These kinds of questions are surprisingly difficult to answer, as they require combining information collected at the prefix, Autonomous System, and country level, and grappling with incomplete knowledge about the AS-level topology and routing policies. In this paper we develop the first framework for country-level routing analysis, which allows us to answer questions about the influence of each country on the flow of international traffic. Our results show that some countries known for their national policies, such as Iran and China, have relatively little effect on interdomain routing, while three countries (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) are central to international reachability, and their policies thus have huge potential impact.