Evaluation

In this section, we evaluate the key properties of Listen and Whisper. Our evaluation is targeted at answering specific questions about Listen and Whisper:

1. How much security can Whisper provide in the face of isolated adversaries?
2. How useful is Listen in the real world? In particular, can it detect reachability problems?
3. How does Listen react in the presence of port scanners? How does one adapt to such port scanners?

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We answer question (1) in Section 6.1, questions (2),(3) in Section 6.2. Our evaluation methodology is two-fold: (a) empirically evaluate the security properties of Whisper; (b) use a real-world deployment to determine usefulness of Listen. To evaluate the security properties of Whisper, it is necessary to determine the effects of the worst-case scenario which is better quantified using an empirical evaluation.

We collected the Internet AS topology data based on BGP advertisements observed from $15$ different vantage points over $17$ days including Routeviews [8] and RIPE [7]. The policy-based routing path between a pair of AS's is determined using customer-provider and peer-peer relationships, which have been inferred based on the technique used in [32].