The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol that networks use to exchange (announce) routing information across the Internet. Unfortunately, BGP has no mechanism to prevent unauthorized announcement of network addresses, also known as prefix hijacks. Since the 1990s, the primary means of protecting against unauthorized origin announcements has been the use of routing information databases, so that networks can verify prefix origin information they receive from their neighbors in BGP messages. In the 1990s, operators deployed databases now collectively known as the Internet Routing Registry (IRR), which depend on voluntary (although sometimes contractually required) contribution of routing information without strict (or sometimes any) validation. Coverage, accuracy, and use of these databases remains inconsistent across ISPs and over time.
In 2012, after years of debate over approaches to improving routing security, the operator community deployed an alternative known as the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). The RPKI includes cryptographic attestation of records, including expiration dates, with each Regional Internet Registry (RIR) operating as a "root" of trust. Similar to the IRR, operators can use the RPKI to discard routing messages that do not pass origin validation checks. But the additional integrity comes with complexity and cost. Furthermore, operational and legal implications of potential malfunctions have limited registration in and use of the RPKI. In response, some networks have redoubled their efforts to improve the accuracy of IRR registration data. These two technologies are now operating in parallel, along with the option of doing nothing at all to validate routes.
Although RPKI use is growing, its limited coverage means that security-conscious operators may query both IRR and RPKI databases to maximize routing security. However, IRR information may be inaccurate due to improper hygiene, such as not updating the origin information after changes in routing policy or prefix ownership. Since RPKI uses a stricter registration and validation process, we use it as a baseline against which to compare the trends in accuracy and coverage of IRR data.
more »
« less
DISCO: Sidestepping RPKI's Deployment Barriers
BGP is a gaping security hole in today's Internet, as evidenced by numerous Internet outages and blackouts, repeated traffic hijacking, and surveillance incidents. Yet, despite Herculean efforts, ubiquitous deployment of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), designed to protect against prefix hijacking attacks, remains distant, due to RPKI's manual and error-prone certification process. We argue that deploying origin authentication at scale requires substituting the standard requirement of certifying legal ownership of IP address blocks with the goal of certifying de facto ownership. We show that settling for de facto ownership is sufficient for protecting against hazardous prefix hijacking and can be accomplished without requiring any changes to today's routing infrastructure. We present APKI, a readily deployable system that automatically certifies de facto ownership and generates the appropriate BGP-path-filtering rules at routers. We evaluate APKI's security and deployability via live experiments on the Internet using a prototype implementation of APKI and through simulations on empirically-derived datasets. To facilitate the reproducibility of our results, we open source our prototype, simulator, and measurement analysis code.
more »
« less
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10155040
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Securing the Internet’s inter-domain routing system against illicit prefix advertisements by third-party networks remains a great concern for the research, standardization, and operator communities. After many unsuccessful attempts to deploy additional security mechanisms for BGP, we now witness increasing adoption of the RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure). Backed by strong cryptography, the RPKI allows network operators to register their BGP prefixes together with the legitimate Autonomous System (AS) number that may originate them via BGP. Recent research shows an encouraging trend: an increasing number of networks around the globe start to register their prefixes in the RPKI. While encouraging, the actual benefit of registering prefixes in the RPKI eventually depends on whether transit providers in the Internet enforce the RPKI’s content, i.e., configure their routers to validate prefix announcements and filter invalid BGP announcements. In this work, we present a broad empirical study tackling the question: To what degree does registration in the RPKI protect a network from illicit announcements of their prefixes, such as prefix hijacks? To this end, we first present a longitudinal study of filtering behavior of transit providers in the Internet, and second we carry out a detailed study of the visibility of legitimate and illegitimate prefix announcements in the global routing table, contrasting prefixes registered in the RPKI with those not registered. We find that an increasing number of transit and access providers indeed do enforce RPKI filtering, which translates to a direct benefit for the networks using the RPKI in the case of illicit announcements of their address space. Our findings bode well for further RPKI adoption and for increasing routing security in the Internet.more » « less
-
An attacker can obtain a valid TLS certificate for a domain by hijacking communication between a certificate authority (CA) and a victim domain. Performing domain validation from multiple vantage points can defend against these attacks. We explore the design space of multi-vantage-point domain validation to achieve (1) security via sufficiently diverse vantage points, (2) performance by ensuring low latency and overhead in certificate issuance, (3) manageability by complying with CA/Browser forum requirements, and requiring minimal changes to CA operations, and (4) a low benign failure rate for legitimate requests. Our open- source implementation was deployed by the Let’s Encrypt CA in February 2020, and has since secured the issuance of more than half a billion certificates during the first year of its deployment. Using real-world operational data from Let’s Encrypt, we show that our approach has negligible latency and communication overhead, and a benign failure rate comparable to conventional designs with one vantage point. Finally, we evaluate the security improvements using a combination of ethically conducted real-world BGP hijacks, Internet-scale traceroute experiments, and a novel BGP simulation framework. We show that multi-vantage-point domain validation can thwart the vast majority of BGP attacks. Our work motivates the deployment of multi-vantage-point domain validation across the CA ecosystem to strengthen TLS certificate issuance and user privacy.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)An attacker can obtain a valid TLS certificate for a domain by hijacking communication between a certificate authority (CA) and a victim domain. Performing domain validation from multiple vantage points can defend against these attacks. We explore the design space of multi-vantage-point domain validation to achieve (1) security via sufficiently diverse vantage points, (2) performance by ensuring low latency and overhead in certificate issuance, (3) manageability by complying with CA/Browser forum requirements, and requiring minimal changes to CA operations, and (4) a low benign failure rate for legitimate requests. Our opensource implementation was deployed by the Let's Encrypt CA in February 2020, and has since secured the issuance of more than half a billion certificates during the first year of its deployment. Using real-world operational data from Let's Encrypt, we show that our approach has negligible latency and communication overhead, and a benign failure rate comparable to conventional designs with one vantage point. Finally, we evaluate the security improvements using a combination of ethically conducted real-world BGP hijacks, Internet-scale traceroute experiments, and a novel BGP simulation framework. We show that multi-vantage-point domain validation can thwart the vast majority of BGP attacks. Our work motivates the deployment of multi-vantage-point domain validation across the CA ecosystem to strengthen TLS certificate issuance and user privacy.more » « less
-
In 2019, the US Department of Homeland Security issued an emergency warning about DNS infrastructure tampering. This alert, in response to a series of attacks against foreign government websites, highlighted how a sophisticated attacker could leverage access to key DNS infrastructure to then hijack traffic and harvest valid login credentials for target organizations. However, even armed with this knowledge, identifying the existence of such incidents has been almost entirely via post hoc forensic reports (i.e., after a breach was found via some other method). Indeed, such attacks are particularly challenging to detect because they can be very short lived, bypass the protections of TLS and DNSSEC, and are imperceptible to users. Identifying them retroactively is even more complicated by the lack of fine-grained Internet-scale forensic data. This paper is a first attempt to make progress at this latter goal. Combining a range of longitudinal data from Internet-wide scans, passive DNS records, and Certificate Transparency logs, we have constructed a methodology for identifying potential victims of sophisticated DNS infrastructure hijacking and have used it to identify a range of victims (primarily government agencies), both those named in prior reporting, and others previously unknown.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.14722/ndss.2020.24355
