Secure Traceroute to Detect Faulty or Malicious Routing

Network routing is vulnerable to disruptions caused by malfunctioning or malicious routers that draw traffic towards themselves but fail to correctly forward the traffic. The existing approach to addressing this problem is to secure the routing protocol by having it validate routing updates, i.e., verify their authenticity, accuracy, and/or consistency. In this paper, we argue that it is also important to ensure the robustness of packet forwarding itself. To this end, we propose a different approach, the central idea of which is a protocol that enables end hosts or routers =to detect and locate the source of (arbitrarily severe) routing misbehaviors, so that appropriate action can be taken.