  The security of the Internet's routing infrastructure has underpinned much of
the past two decades of distributed systems security research. However, the
converse is increasingly true. Routing and path decisions are now important for
the security properties of systems built on top of the Internet. In particular,
BGP poisoning leverages the de facto routing protocol between Autonomous
Systems (ASes) to maneuver the return paths of upstream networks onto
previously unusable, new paths. These new paths can be used to avoid
congestion, censors, geo-political boundaries, or any feature of the topology
which can be expressed at an AS-level. Given the increase in BGP poisoning
usage as a security primitive, we set out to evaluate poisoning feasibility in
practice beyond simulation.
  To that end, using an Internet-scale measurement infrastructure, we capture
and analyze over 1,400 instances of BGP poisoning across thousands of ASes as a
mechanism to maneuver return paths of traffic. We analyze in detail the
performance of steering paths, the graph-theoretic aspects of available paths,
and re-evaluate simulated systems with this data. We find that the real-world
evidence does not completely support the findings from simulated systems
published in the literature. We also analyze filtering of BGP poisoning across
types of ASes and ISP working groups. We explore the connectivity concerns when
poisoning by reproducing a decade old experiment to uncover the current state
of an Internet triple the size. We build predictive models for understanding an
ASes' vulnerability to poisoning. Finally, an exhaustive measurement of an
upper bound on the maximum path length of the Internet is presented, detailing
how security research should react to ASes leveraging poisoned long paths. In
total, our results and analysis expose the real-world impact of BGP poisoning
on past and future security research.
