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.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2025
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2247810
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10510489
- 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
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