BGP is essential to the operation of the Internet, but is vulnerable to both accidental failures and malicious attacks. We propose a new protocol that works in concert with BGP, which Autonomous Systems will use to help detect and mitigate accidentally or maliciously introduced faulty routing information. The protocol differs from previous efforts at securing BGP in that it is receiver-driven, meaning that there is a mechanism for recipients of BGP UPDATE messages to corroborate the information they receive and to provide feedback. We argue that our new protocol can be adopted incrementally, and we show that there is incentive for network operators to do so. We also describe our prototype implementation.

Attacks against Internet routing are increasing in number and severity. Contributing greatly to these attacks is the absence of origin authentication: there is no way to validate claims of address ownership or location. The lack of such services enables not only attacks by malicious entities, but indirectly allow seemingly inconsequential miconfigurations to disrupt large portions of the Internet. This paper considers the semantics, design, and costs of origin authentication in interdomain routing. We formalize the semantics of address delegation and use on the Internet, and develop and characterize broad classes of origin authentication proof systems. We estimate the address delegation graph representing the current use of IPv4 address space using available routing data. This effort reveals that current address delegation is dense and relatively static: as few as 16 entities perform 80% of the delegation on the Internet. We conclude by evaluating the proposed services via traced based simulation. Our simulation shows the enhanced proof systems can significantly reduce resource costs associated with origin authentication.