skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: BGP-iSec: Improved Security of Internet Routing Against Post-ROV Attacks
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2247810
PAR ID:
10510489
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Internet Society
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2024
ISBN:
1-891562-93-2
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
San Diego, CA, USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Usenix)
    Withdrawal suppression has been a known weakness of BGP for over a decade. It has a significant detrimental impact on both the reliability and security of inter-domain routing on the Internet. This paper presents Route Status Transparency (RoST), the first design that efficiently and securely thwarts withdrawal suppression misconfigurations and attacks. RoST allows ASes to efficiently verify whether a route has been withdrawn; it is compatible with BGP as well as with BGP security enhancements. We use simulations on the Internet’s AS-level topology to evaluate the benefits from adopting RoST. We use an extensive real-world BGP announcements dataset to show that it is efficient in terms of storage, bandwidth, and computational requirements. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; (, Passive and Active Measurement Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
    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
  3. ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference)
    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
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems)
    The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) offers several knobs to control routing decisions, but they are coarse-grained and only affect routes received from neighboring Autonomous Systems (AS). To enhance policy expressiveness, BGP was extended with thecommunitiesattribute, allowing an AS to attach metadata to routes and influence the routing decisions of a remote AS. The metadata can carryinformationto (e.g., where a route was received) or request anactionfrom a remote AS (e.g., not to export a route to one of its neighbors). Unfortunately, the semantics of BGP communities are not standardized, lack universal rules, and are poorly documented. In this work, we design and evaluate algorithms to automatically uncover BGPaction communitiesand ASes that violate standard practices by consistently using theinformation communitiesof other ASes, revealing undocumented relationships between them (e.g., siblings). Our experimental evaluation with billions of route announcements from public BGP route collectors from 2018 to 2023 uncovers previously unknown AS relationships and shows that our algorithm for identifying action communities achieves average precision and recall of 92.5% and 86.5%, respectively. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2022)
    The Internet Route Registry (IRR) and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) both emerged as different solutions to improve routing security in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) by allowing networks to register information and develop route filters based on information other networks have registered. RPKI is a crypto system, with associated complexity and policy challenges; it has seen substantial but slowing adoption. IRR databases often contain inaccurate records due to lack of validation standards. Given the widespread use of IRR for routing security purposes, this inaccuracy merits further study. We study IRR accuracy by quantifying the consistency between IRR and RPKI records, analyze the causes of inconsistency, and examine which ASes are contributing correct IRR information. In October 2021, we found ROAs for around 20% of RADB IRR records, and a consistency of 38% and 60% in v4 and v6. For RIPE IRR, we found ROAs for 47% records and a consistency of 73% and 82% in v4 and v6. For APNIC IRR, we found ROAs for 76% records and a high consistency of 98% and 99% in v4 and v6. For AFRINIC IRR, we found ROAs for only 4% records and a consistency of 93% and 97% in v4 and v6. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email