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We present BGP-iSec, an enhancement of the BGPsec protocol for securing BGP, the Internet’s inter-domain routing protocol. BGP-iSec ensures additional and stronger security properties, compared to BGPsec, without significant extra overhead. The main improvements are: (i) Security for partial adoption: BGP-iSec provides significant security benefits for early adopters, in contrast to BGPsec, which requires universal adoption. (ii) Defense against route leakage: BGP-iSec defends against route leakage, a common cause of misrouting that is not prevented by BGPsec. (iii) Integrity of attributes: BGP-iSec ensures the integrity of integrity-protected attributes, thereby preventing announcement manipulation attacks not prevented by BGPsec. We argue that BGP-iSec achieves these goals using extensive simulations as well as security analysis. The BGP-iSec design conforms, where possible, with the BGPsec design, modifying it only where necessary to improve security or ease deployment. By providing stronger security guarantees, especially for partial adoption, we hope BGP-iSec will be a step towards finally protecting interdomain routing, which remains, for many years, a vulnerability of the Internet’s infrastructure.
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A Data-Driven Approach to Understanding the State of Internet Routing Security
This paper is concerned with the global routing system of the Internet, its serious and persistent vulnerabilities, the multi-disciplinary considerations shaping this space, and recent trends that finally improve its security. We report real-world evidence of the state of routing security with the goal of discussing possible options for better security. We offer two high-level conclusions. First, in designing an approach it is all-important to understand complexities and incentives for deployment. Second, any scheme that is picked for deployment will take time to have an effect, so having a realistic view of how quickly change can be accomplished is essential.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1724853
- PAR ID:
- 10351088
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SSRN Electronic Journal
- ISSN:
- 1556-5068
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Although Internet routing security best practices have recently seen auspicious increases in uptake, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have limited incentives to deploy them. They are operationally complex and expensive to implement and provide little competitive advantage. The practices with significant uptake protect only against origin hijacks, leaving unresolved the more general threat of path hijacks. We propose a new approach to improved routing security that achieves four design goals: improved incentive alignment to implement best practices; protection against path hijacks; expanded scope of such protection to customers of those engaged in the practices; and reliance on existing capabilities rather than needing complex new software in every participating router. Our proposal leverages an existing coherent core of interconnected ISPs to create a zone of trust, a topological region that protects not only all networks in the region, but all directly attached customers of those networks. Customers benefit from choosing ISPs committed to the practices, and ISPs thus benefit from committing to the practices. We discuss the concept of a zone of trust as a new, more pragmatic approach to security that improves security in a region of the Internet, as opposed to striving for global deployment. We argue that the aspiration for global deployment is unrealistic, since the global Internet includes malicious actors. We compare our approach to other schemes and discuss how a related proposal, ASPA, could be used to increase the scope of protection our scheme achieves. We hope this proposal inspires discussion of how the industry can make practical, measurable progress against the threat of route hijacks in the short term by leveraging institutionalized cooperation rooted in transparency and accountability.more » « less
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Tessaro, Stefano (Ed.)Onion routing is the most widely used approach to anonymous communication online. The idea is that Alice wraps her message to Bob in layers of encryption to form an “onion” and routes it through a series of intermediaries. Each intermediary’s job is to decrypt (“peel”) the onion it receives to obtain instructions for where to send it next. The intuition is that, by the time it gets to Bob, the onion will have mixed with so many other onions that its origin will be hard to trace even for an adversary that observes the entire network and controls a fraction of the participants, possibly including Bob. Despite its widespread use in practice, until now no onion routing protocol was known that simultaneously achieved, in the presence of an active adversary that observes all network traffic and controls a constant fraction of the participants, (a) anonymity; (b) fault-tolerance, where even if a few of the onions are dropped, the protocol still delivers the rest; and (c) reasonable communication and computational complexity as a function of the security parameter and the number of participants. In this paper, we give the first onion routing protocol that meets these goals: our protocol (a) achieves anonymity; (b) tolerates a polylogarithmic (in the security parameter) number of dropped onions and still delivers the rest; and (c) requires a polylogarithmic number of rounds and a polylogarithmic number of onions sent per participant per round. We also show that to achieve anonymity in a fault-tolerant fashion via onion routing, this number of onions and rounds is necessary. Of independent interest, our analysis introduces two new security properties of onion routing – mixing and equalizing – and we show that together they imply anonymity.more » « less
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Mutually Agreed Norms on Routing Security (MANRS) is an industry-led initiative to improve Internet routing security by encouraging participating networks to implement a series of mandatory or recommended actions. MANRS members must register their IP prefixes in a trusted routing database and use such information to prevent propagation of invalid routing information. MANRS membership has increased significantly in recent years, but the impact of the MANRS initiative on the overall Internet routing security remains unclear. In this paper, we provide the first independent look into the MANRS ecosystem by using publicly available data to analyze the routing behavior of participant networks. We quantify MANRS participants' level of conformance with the stated requirements, and compare the behavior of MANRS and non-MANRS networks. While not all MANRS members fully comply with all required actions, we find that they are more likely to implement routing security practices described in MANRS actions. We assess the relevance of the MANRS effort in securing the overall routing ecosystem. We found that as of May 2022, over 83% of MANRS networks were conformant to the route filtering requirement by dropping BGP messages with invalid information according to authoritative records, and over 95% were conformant to the routing information facilitation requirement, registering their resources in authoritative databases.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3750155
