Patent ID: 8769662

Claim:
A method of operating a communication network, comprising: identifying a plurality of potential hijack autonomous systems that can be used to generate a corrupt routing path from a source autonomous system to a destination autonomous system; for each of the plurality of potential hijack autonomous systems: identifying a regional autonomous system that is to adopt the corrupt routing path from the source autonomous system to the destination autonomous system; and determining a reflector autonomous system set such that, for each reflector autonomous system in the set, a source autonomous system to reflector autonomous system routing path and a reflector autonomous system to destination autonomous system routing path do not comprise the regional autonomous system; then identifying one of the reflector autonomous systems that is common among the reflector autonomous system sets responsive to performing the identifying and determining operations for each of the plurality of potential hijack autonomous systems; detecting that the routing path from the source autonomous system to the destination autonomous system has been corrupted; directing communication traffic from the source autonomous system to the destination autonomous system through the one of the reflector autonomous systems that was identified; determining, for each of the plurality of potential hijack autonomous systems, a mirror autonomous system set such that, for each mirror autonomous system in the set, a source autonomous system to mirror autonomous system routing path does not comprise the regional autonomous system; and identifying a mirror autonomous system that is common among the mirror autonomous system sets responsive to performing the identifying and determining the mirror autonomous system set operations for each of the plurality of potential hijack autonomous systems.