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.

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.

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The Internet has become a critical communication infrastructure which we are increasingly reliant upon. As the world moves into a converged network where voice, video, and data are all transmitted over the same network, disruption of the Internet can cause more severe damage. Therefore, it is critical in order to protect the Internet from potential service disruption to ensure its continous functioning. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard and only inter-domain routing protocol used on the Internet. BGP discovers and maintains routing information used for transmitting traffic across the Internet. Attacks on BGP will result in large scale service disruption. Thus, BGP is widely considered as a crucial component of the Internet infrastructure. In this report, we study BGP security. Specifically, we study 1) the BGP protocol and its real world operations; 2) BGP security vulnerabilities and threats; and 3) BGP security mechanisms, including S-BGP from BBN, soBGP from Cisco, and psBGP from Carleton University. This report aims to provide sufficient background information for understanding BGP security issues, and to better understand the differences between existing BGP security proposals and the challenges