On Inferring Autonomous System Relationships in the Internet

This paper explains the various relationships between different Autonomous systems (AS) in the Internet and how their routing policies ensure these economic relationships. It goes on to attempt to infer these relationships by looking at publicly available routing table entries based on some patterns authors observed.

Like all other reverse engineering types of work, there is a bit of heuristics involved. The author makes the assumption that businesses define their routing tables based on their business relationships. Therefore, we can work out the business relationship based on routing tables. However, through this work, interestingly enough, they were able to uncover misconfigurations of routing policies.

The author used a lot of formal mathematics in explaining the details, which is perhaps a bit difficult to understand for someone who is not well versed in network theory and graph theory. I would not mind reading something else instead since the idea is neat but the details are not as interesting.