Understanding the Stealthy BGP Hijacking Risk in the ROV Era
Yihao Chen
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2026 · Day 3 · Evasion Attacks
This research reveals a concerning side effect of partial **RPKI/ROV (Route Origin Validation)** deployment: **stealthy BGP hijacking**. While ROV effectively prevents direct hijacking at deployed ASes, it creates inconsistent routing views across the internet -- a protected AS may forward traffic through an unprotected neighbor that silently diverts it to a hijacker. Because the hijack is invisible in the control plane of the ROV-deploying AS, these attacks evade both monitoring systems and post-incident analysis.
AI review
A rigorous measurement and simulation study revealing that partial RPKI/ROV deployment creates a 14.1% success probability for stealthy sub-prefix hijacking -- a risk that paradoxically didn't exist before ROV. The 1,300 observed events in 2 months are hard evidence, and the inverted-U risk curve provides a concrete deployment target. However, this is measurement/analysis work rather than an exploitation paper, and the mechanisms described are well-understood by anyone who thinks carefully about partial deployment.