INCIDENT REPLAY · 2013-08-16 (to 2013-08-22)
Hacking Team / Aruba announce a Santrex /24 for the Italian ROS
After Santrex's hosting failed, the operators of a surveillance tool lost contact with their implants. Aruba announced Santrex's /24 for six days so a replacement server at 46.166.163.175 could regain control. Revealed by the 2015 Hacking Team leak and confirmed in historical BGP data.
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: Aruba S.p.A. (AS31034) announced 46.166.163.0/24 belonging to Santrex, at the request of Hacking Team and the Carabinieri ROS
The summary at the top is paraphrased from the sources below. Hammerhead's catalog rates its confidence in this account high.
Sources
What the public record says
- After Santrex's hosting failed, the operators of a surveillance tool lost contact with their implants. Aruba announced Santrex's /24 for six days so a replacement server at 46.166.163.175 could regain control. Revealed by the 2015 Hacking Team leak and confirmed in historical BGP data.
- Who: Aruba S.p.A. (AS31034) announced 46.166.163.0/24 belonging to Santrex, at the request of Hacking Team and the Carabinieri ROS
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): UPSTREAM-1 (AS 64500, Aruba's upstream) has a session to ARUBA-1 (AS 31034, Aruba, announcing a /24 it did not hold) 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. - The announcing side's change originated space it did not hold, intentionally; the upstream's session that carried it is modelled without an inbound prefix filter.
- 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.
UPSTREAM-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)
- UPSTREAM-1
- 31034
First run, before the fixes this batch prompted
first: fail (finding)1 row(s) returned (expected 0); first: s.device=UPSTREAM-1 s.peer=172.16.0.2 s.remote_as=31034
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: The announcing operator's change originates space it does not hold, which an ownership check flags even when the change is intentional; Aruba's upstreams also lacked origin filtering.
Imported from docs/replays/hacking-team-2013/FACTS.md and the replay manifests in the Hammerhead repository at commit 0ee9732.