E-Embargoes: Discouraging the Deployment of Traffic Manipulating Boxes With Economic Incentives

TL;DR

This paper proposes an economic approach to discourage traffic manipulating systems by incentivizing ISPs to remove them through revenue loss, demonstrating potential billion-dollar impacts on ISP profits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel economic pressure method against traffic manipulating boxes, expanding previous routing attacks to maximize financial disincentives for deployment.

Findings

Routing around TMBs can cause over a billion dollars in annual ISP revenue loss.

Economic incentives can effectively discourage the deployment of traffic manipulating systems.

The approach leverages the direct relationship between traffic flow and ISP revenue.

Abstract

An increasing number of systems have been proposed or deployed to the transit core of the Internet with the goal of observing and manipulating traffic in flight, systems we term Traffic Manipulating Boxes. Examples of these include: decoy routing systems, surveillance infrastructure like the NSA's alleged QUANTUM project, and traffic shaping middleboxes. In this work, we examine a new approach that a routing capable adversary might take to resisting these systems: the use of economic pressure to incentivize ISPs to remove them. Rather than directly attacking the availability of these systems, our attack inflicts economic losses, in the form of reduced transit revenue, on ISPs that deploy them, while at the same time incentivizing ISPs that do not. We alter and expand upon previous routing around decoys attack of Schuchard et al., by adjusting the priority given to avoiding TMBs. This reduces or eliminates the key costs faced by routing capable adversary while maintaining the effectiveness of the attack. Additionally, we show that since the flow of traffic on the Internet is directly related to the flow of cash between ISPs, a routing capable adversary is actually a powerful economic adversary. Our findings show that by preferentially using routes which are free of TMBs, some routing capable adversaries can inflict in excess of a billion dollars in annual revenue losses.