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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. 

The security of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and inter-domain routing in general, remains a challenge, in spite of its well-known importance, repeated attacks and incidents, and extensive efforts and research over decades. We present BGPy, an open-source, extensible, robust, easy-to-use and efficient BGP security simulator, to be used for research and education. BGPy allows realistic simulations of a large variety of BGP attacks and defenses. It is provided as a Python package, and can be further customized and extended, e.g., to investigate new attacks and new defense mechanisms. We describe how BGPy is currently used by multiple BGP security projects. 

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.