INCIDENT REPLAY · 2018-04-24
AWS Route 53 prefixes hijacked via eNet (MyEtherWallet)
For about 2 hours, more-specific routes covering Amazon Route 53 DNS address space were announced by AS10297 and accepted by some peers. DNS queries reaching the bogus servers were answered only for myetherwallet.com and directed users to a phishing site.
A reconstruction, not the operator's network. Hammerhead's authors rebuilt the change from the public record as a small network of their own. No configuration here is the operator's. What follows is what the tool reported on that reconstruction; it is not a claim that the tool would have prevented the outage.
What happened
Who: Amazon Route 53 (victim); eNet AS10297 originated, Hurricane Electric AS6939 propagated
The summary at the top is paraphrased from the sources below. Hammerhead's catalog rates its confidence in this account medium.
Sources
- https://blog.cloudflare.com/bgp-leaks-and-crypto-currencies/
- https://doublepulsar.com/hijack-of-amazons-internet-domain-service-used-to-reroute-web-traffic-for-two-hours-unnoticed-3a6f0dda6a6f
- https://manrs.org/2018/04/a-deeper-dive-into-the-amazon-route-53-bgp-hijack/
- https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/04/amazons-route-53-bgp-hijack/
- https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/24/myetherwallet_dns_hijack/
- https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/amazon-route-53-dns-and-bgp-hijack
What the public record says
- For about 2 hours, more-specific routes covering Amazon Route 53 DNS address space were announced by AS10297 and accepted by some peers. DNS queries reaching the bogus servers were answered only for myetherwallet.com and directed users to a phishing site.
- Who: Amazon Route 53 (victim); eNet AS10297 originated, Hurricane Electric AS6939 propagated
What the reconstruction assumed
Decided by Hammerhead's authors to build a network that runs. None of it describes the operator's network.
Everything below is ours.
- The family template (
tools/replays/gen_family_audit.py): PEER-1 (AS 64500, a peer that accepted eNet's announcement) has a session to ENET-1 (AS 10297, eNet, originating Route 53 space) with no inbound prefix filter, a prefix limit, no AS-path filter, and a second session with every safeguard, so that each finding is one row. - Nothing in the victim's configuration could be checked. The originating AS and the peers lacking origin or prefix filters are the auditable side; one such peer session is modelled.
- No change is replayed: the announcing network's change is not ours to gate. The audit runs on the accepting router's healthy configuration.
- Cisco IOS syntax and stand-in address space throughout. A reconstruction, not any operator's configuration.
What Hammerhead said
Each run below is pinned by Hammerhead's replay tests at commit 0ee9732: the verdict and the quoted text are checked against the tool's output, and a run that disagrees fails the test. Reason lines are copied verbatim; a pinned line can be part of a longer reason. Every preflight run uses --max-blast-radius 100, so a change is never counted as caught merely because it touched many devices of a small network.
PEER-1's own router, no change: no inbound filter
now: fail (finding)An audit of one snapshot, no change: hammerhead nqe-library --mode run, check nqe.bgp.route_map_in_attached. Pinned status: fail, a finding whose evidence contains the text below.
Evidence pinned (the evidence contains each line)
- 1 row(s)
- PEER-1
- 10297
First run, before the fixes this batch prompted
first: fail (finding)1 row(s) returned (expected 0); first: s.device=PEER-1 s.peer=172.16.0.2 s.remote_as=10297
Pinned in tests/gauntlet/replays-audit.yaml.
What changed in Hammerhead because of it
From the “What was fixed” table in Hammerhead's replay notes, where each fix landed after a failing test. “Found by” is copied as written; a family name means the batch this incident belongs to.
Inbound max prefix length and AS-path filter on BgpSession
prefix_list_max_length and a new ebgp_inbound_as_path_filter audit stop being stubs: a /32 for somebody else's address wins by longest match wherever it is accepted; a prefix filter generated from a forged registry object says nothing about whose path.
Found by: Accepting-network family
Limits
- The configurations are a reconstruction. Where the record is silent, the assumptions above fill the gap; if one is wrong, the replay is wrong in that respect.
- A verdict describes the reconstructed network's converged state. Timing, traffic load, and anything a device does that no configuration states, such as software reacting to a health check or a firmware bug, are outside it.
- A pass is reported as a pass. A fail says a gate fired on the reconstruction, nothing more.
- Why the catalog counts this outage as partly in scope: Nothing in AWS's configs could be checked; it is in remit only for the originating AS and for peers lacking origin/prefix filters.
Imported from docs/replays/enet-route53-2018/FACTS.md and the replay manifests in the Hammerhead repository at commit 0ee9732.