We would like to thank the community for sharing both their concerns and support.
We have decided that we will NOT run the experiment for now.
We would like to clarify some of the existing concerns.
Concern #1: Risks about operational disruption.
We would have only announced an IP prefix that we control and for which the only data traffic will be the one that we generate during the experiment.
Concern #2: Reputation damage.
We did not think about this point. When talking with our testbed's contact points, they suggested surrounding each poisoned AS with two occurrences of the testbed ASN in the AS path. As an example, when poisoning ASN_1 and ASN_2, our AS path would have looked like <ORIGIN_ASN --- ASN_1 --- ORIGIN_ASN --- ASN_2 --- ORIGIN_ASN>. In this way, any peering inference systems would only infer one relationship with ORIGIN_ASN, which can easily be filtered.
Concern #3: Poisoning usage.
As it was mentioned in a previous email, AS path poisoning can be used for steering inbound traffic away from some networks. In our experiment, this would have meant that our generated traffic would have not traversed the poisoned AS networks. There was a recent in-depth study on the level of effectiveness of poisoning for inbound traffic steering:
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/24240-paper.pdf .