Securing the Border Gateway Protocol: A Status Update

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a critical component of the Internet routing infrastructure, used to distribute routing information between autonomous systems (ASes). It is highly vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks and benign operator errors. Under DARPA sponsorship, BBN has developed a secure version of BGP (S-BGP) that addresses most of BGP’s architectural security problems. This paper reviews BGP vulnerabilities and their implications, derives security requirements based on the semantics of the protocol, and describes the S-BGP architecture. Refinements to the original S-BGP design, based on interactions with ISP operations personnel and further experience with a prototype implementation are presented, including a heuristic for significantly improving performance. The paper concludes with a comparison of S-BGP to other proposed approaches. Problem Description Routing in the public Internet is based on a distributed system composed of many routers, grouped into manag...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CMS
• Authors: Stephen T. Kent
• Keywords: BGP Vulnerabilities, BGP’s Architectural Security, Border Gateway Protocol, CMS 2003, CMS 2010