BGP Security in Partial Deployment: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

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

CAIR: Using Formal Languages to Study Routing, Leaking, and Interception in BGP

The Internet routing protocol BGP expresses topological reachability and policy-based decisions simultaneously in path vectors. A complete view on the Internet backbone routing is given by the collection of all valid routes, which is infeasible to obtain due to information hiding of BGP, the lack of omnipresent collection points, and data complexity. Commonly, graph-based data models are used to represent the Internet topology from a given set of BGP routing tables but fall short of explaining policy contexts. As a consequence, routing anomalies such as route leaks and interception attacks cannot be explained with graphs. In this paper, we use formal languages to represent the global routing system in a rigorous model. Our CAIR framework translates BGP announcements into a finite route language that allows for the incremental construction of minimal route automata. CAIR preserves route diversity, is highly efficient, and well-suited to monitor BGP path changes in real-time. We formally derive implementable search patterns for route leaks and interception attacks. In contrast to the state-of-the-art, we can detect these incidents. In practical experiments, we analyze public BGP data over the last seven years