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BGP security in partial deployment: is the juice worth the squeeze?

Published: 27 August 2013 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    As the rollout of secure route origin authentication with the RPKI slowly gains traction among network operators, there is a push to standardize secure path validation for BGP (i.e., S*BGP: S-BGP, soBGP, BGPSEC, etc.). Origin authentication already does much to improve routing security. Moreover, the transition to S*BGP is expected to be long and slow, with S*BGP coexisting in "partial deployment" alongside BGP for a long time. We therefore use theoretical and experimental approach to study the security benefits provided by partially-deployed S*BGP, vis-a-vis those already provided by origin authentication. Because routing policies have a profound impact on routing security, we use a survey of 100 network operators to find the policies that are likely to be most popular during partial S*BGP deployment. We find that S*BGP provides only meagre benefits over origin authentication when these popular policies are used. We also study the security benefits of other routing policies, provide prescriptive guidelines for partially-deployed S*BGP, and show how interactions between S*BGP and BGP can introduce new vulnerabilities into the routing system.

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      Published In

      cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
      ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 43, Issue 4
      October 2013
      595 pages
      ISSN:0146-4833
      DOI:10.1145/2534169
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        SIGCOMM '13: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 conference on SIGCOMM
        August 2013
        580 pages
        ISBN:9781450320566
        DOI:10.1145/2486001
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 27 August 2013
      Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 43, Issue 4

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      Author Tags

      1. bgp
      2. partial deployment
      3. routing
      4. security

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      • (2023)APVAS: Reducing the Memory Requirement of AS_PATH Validation by Introducing Aggregate Signatures into BGPsecIEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences10.1587/transfun.2022CIP0024E106.A:3(170-184)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
      • (2023)The Juice Is Worth the Squeeze: Analysis of Autonomous System Provider Authorization in Partial DeploymentIEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society10.1109/OJCOMS.2022.32338334(269-306)Online publication date: 2023
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