Josh at YISEC 2024

Even a small change to Internet routing protocols or their configurations can have devastating consequences for the security and stability of global Internet routing, but test environments for alternate routing protocols continue to be limited in size and fail to capture the scale of the Internet.

In the work presented at YISEC 2024, we outline our approach to building a new, Internet-scale virtual testbed for internetwork routing protocols. Capturing the state of Internet topology as demonstrated in our previous work, we subsequently use our Internet graph to generate a virtual testbed configuration utilising a container orchestration framework, with each container representing an ISP-level network (Autonomous System, AS).

We then demonstrate the potential for Internet routing protocol enhancement using this digital twin of the real-world Internet topology for a a few smaller countries, with the intention that in later work we will be able to expand our approach to replicating the complete observed Internet topology.

In summary, our contribution is an improvement to existing Internet routing protocol test environments by replicating real-world Internet topology using virtualised containers duplicating each observed Internet-participating AS, such that developments and enhancements to routing protocols can be observed in representative environments prior to real-world deployment.