Symmetric Key Approaches to Securing BGP - A Little Bit Trust Is Enough

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol that connects autonomous systems (ASes). Despite its importance for the Internet infrastructure, BGP is vulnerable to a variety of attacks due to lack of security mechanisms in place. Many BGP security mechanisms have been proposed, however, none of them has been deployed because of either high cost or high complexity. The right trade-off between efficiency and security has been ever challenging. In this paper, we attempt to trade-off between efficiency and security by giving a little dose of trust to BGP routers. We present a new flexible threat model that assumes for any path of length h, at least one BGP router is trustworthy, where h is a parameter that can be tuned according to security requirements. Based on this threat model, we present two new symmetric key approaches to securing BGP: the centralized key distribution approach and the distributed key distribution approach. Comparing our approaches to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ESORICS
• Authors: Bezawada Bruhadeshwar, Sandeep S. Kulkarni, Alex X. Liu
• Keywords: Bgp Router, ESORICS 2008, Security Privacy, Signature Generation Cost, Signature Verification