In this paper, we propose BIND (Binding Instructions aNd Data), a fine-grained attestation service for securing distributed systems. Code attestation has recently received considerable attention in trusted computing. However, current code attestation technology is relatively immature. First, due to the great variability in software versions and configurations, verification of the hash is difficult. Second, the time-of-use and time-of-attestation discrepancy remains to be addressed, since the code may be correct at the time of the attestation, but it may be compromised by the time of use. The goal of BIND is to address these issues and make code attestation more usable in securing distributed systems. BIND offers the following properties: 1) BIND performs fine-grained attestation. Instead of attesting to the entire memory content, BIND attests only to the piece of code we are concerned about. This greatly simplifies verification. 2) BIND narrows the gap between time-ofattestation and time-of-use. BIND measures a piece of code immediately before it is executed and uses a sand-boxing mechanism to protect the execution of the attested code. 3) BIND ties the code attestation with the data that the code produces, such that we can pinpoint what code has been run to generate that data. In addition, by incorporating the verification of input data integrity into the attestation, BIND offers transitive integrity verification, i.e., through one signature, we can vouch for the entire chain of processes that have performed transformations over a piece of data. BIND offers a general solution toward establishing a trusted environment for distributed system designers.

In a BGP prefix hijacking event, a router originates a route to a prefix, but does not provide data delivery to the actual prefix. Prefix hijacking events have been widely reported and are a serious problem in the Internet. This paper presents a new Prefix Hijack Alert System (PHAS). PHAS is a real-time notification system that alerts prefix owners when their BGP origin changes. By providing reliable and timely notification of origin AS changes, PHAS allows prefix owners to quickly and easily detect prefix hijacking events and take prompt action to address the problem. We illustrate the effectiveness of PHAS and evaluate its overhead using BGP logs collected from RouteViews. PHAS is light-weight, easy to implement, and readily deployable. In addition to protecting against false BGP origins, the PHAS concept can be extended to detect prefix hijacking events that involve announcing more specific prefixes or modifying the last hop in the path.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto interdomain routing protocol of the Internet. Although the performance of BGP has been historically acceptable, there are continuing concerns about its ability to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving Internet. A major limitation of BGP is its failure to adequately address security. Recent outages and security analyses clearly indicate that the Internet routing infrastructure is highly vulnerable. Moreover, the design and ubiquity of BGP has frustrated past efforts at securing interdomain routing. This paper considers the vulnerabilities currently existing within interdomain routing and surveys works relating to BGP security. The limitations and advantages of proposed solutions are explored, and the systemic and operational implications of their designs considered. We note that no current solution has yet found an adequate balance between comprehensive security and deployment cost. This work calls not only for the application of ideas described within this paper, but also for further investigation into the problems and solutions of BGP security.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an IETF standard inter-domain routing protocol on the Internet. However, it is well known that BGP is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, and that a single misconfigured or malicious BGP speaker could result in large scale service disruption. We first summarize a set of security goals for BGP, and then propose Pretty Secure BGP (ps-BGP) as a new security protocol achieving these goals. psBGP makes use of a centralized trust model for authenticating Autonomous System (AS) numbers, and a decentralized trust model for verifying the propriety of IP prefix origination. We compare psBGP with S-BGP and soBGP, the two leading security proposals for BGP. We believe psBGP trades off the strong security guarantees of S-BGP for presumed-simpler operations, while requiring a different endorsement model: each AS must select a small number (e.g., one or two) of its peers from which to obtain endorsement of its prefix ownership assertions. This work contributes to the ongoing exploration of tradeoffs and balance between security guarantee, operational simplicity, and policies acceptable to the operator community. 1.

Despite the existence of many security schemes for BGP with varying properties, to date there has been little progress on actual BGP security adoption. Although feasibility for widespread adoption remains the greatest hurdle for BGP security, there has been little quantitative research into what exactly improves the adoptability of a security scheme. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first model for characterizing the adoptability of a protocol. Furthermore, we present an approach for performing this evaluation by simulating incentives compatible adoption decisions of ISPs on the Internet under a variety of assumptions. Our extensive evaluation results include: (a) the existence of a sharp threshold, where, if the cost of adoption is below the threshold, complete adoption takes place, while almost no adoption takes place above the threshold; (b) under a strong attacker model, adding a single hop of path authentication to origin authentication yields similar adoptability characteristics as a full path security scheme; (c) under a weaker attacker model, adding full path authentication (e.g., via S-BGP [10]) significantly improves the adoptability of BGP security over weaker path security schemes such as soBGP [18]. These results provide insight into the development of more adoptable secure BGP protocols and demonstrate the importance of studying adoptability of protocols. 1

As more and more Internet IP prefix hijacking incidents are being reported, the value of hijacking detection services has become evident. Most of the current hijacking detection approaches monitor IP prefixes on the control plane and detect inconsistencies in route advertisements and route qualities. We propose a different approach that utilizes information collected mostly from the data plane. Our method is motivated by two key observations: when a prefix is not hijacked, 1) the hop count of the path from a source to this prefix is generally stable; and 2) the path from a source to this prefix is almost always a super-path of the path from the same source to a reference point along the previous path, as long as the reference point is topologically close to the prefix. By carefully selecting multiple vantage points and monitoring from these vantage points for any departure from these two observations, our method is able to detect prefix hijacking with high accuracy in a light-weight, distributed, and real-time fashion. Through simulations constructed based on real Internet measurement traces, we demonstrate that our scheme is accurate with both false positive and false negative ratios below 0.5%.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) controls inter-domain routing in the Internet. BGP is vulnerable to many attacks, since routers rely on hearsay information from neighbors. Secure BGP (S-BGP) uses DSA to provide route authentication and mitigate many of these risks. However, many performance and deployment issues prevent S-BGP’s real-world deployment. Previous work has explored improving S-BGP processing latencies, but space problems, such as increased message size and memory cost, remain the major obstacles. In this paper, we design aggregated path authentication schemes by combining two efficient cryptographic techniques— signature amortization and aggregate signatures. We propose six constructions for aggregated path authentication that substantially improve efficiency of S-BGP’s path authentication on both speed and space criteria. Our performance evaluation shows that the new schemes achieve such an efficiency that they may overcome the space obstacles and provide a real-world practical solution for BGP security. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.0 [Computer-communication networks]: General-security and

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto interdomain routing protocol on the Internet. While the serious vulnerabilities of BGP are well known, no security solution has been widely deployed. The lack of adoption is largely caused by a failure to find a balance between deployability, cost, and security. In this paper, we consider the design and performance of BGP path authentication constructions that limit resource costs by exploiting route stability. Based on a year-long study of BGP traffic and indirectly supported by findings within the networking community, we observe that routing paths are highly stable. This observation leads to comprehensive and efficient constructions for path authentication. We empirically analyze the resource consumption of the proposed constructions via trace-based simulations. This latter study indicates that our constructions can reduce validation costs by as much as 97.3 % over existing proposals while requiring nominal storage resources. We conclude by considering operational issues related to incremental deployment of our solution.

There have been many incidents of prefix hijacking in the Internet. The hijacking AS can blackhole the hijacked traffic. Alternatively, it can transparently intercept the hijacked traffic by forwarding it onto the owner. This paper presents a study of such prefix hijacking and interception with the following contributions: (1). We present a methodology for prefix interception, (2). We estimate the fraction of traffic to any prefix that can be hijacked and intercepted in the Internet today, (3). The interception methodology is implemented and used to intercept real traffic to our prefix, (4). We conduct a detailed study to detect ongoing prefix interception. We find that: Our hijacking estimates are in line with the impact of past hijacking incidents and show that ASes higher up in the routing hierarchy can hijack a significant amount of traffic to any prefix, including popular prefixes. A less apparent result is that the same holds for prefix interception too. Further, our implementation shows that intercepting traffic to a prefix in the Internet is almost as simple as hijacking it. Finally, while we fail to detect ongoing prefix interception, the detection exercise highlights some of the challenges posed by the prefix interception problem.

Over the past decade, the complexity of the Internet's routing infrastructure has increased dramatically. This complexity and the problems it causes stem not just from various new demands made of the routing infrastructure, but also from fundamental limitations in the ability of today's distributed infrastructure to scalably cope with new requirements.