An Infrastructure Supporting Secure Internet Routing

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [1] is the foundation of inter-domain Internet routing. A number of papers have described how BGP is highly vulnerable to a wide range of attacks [2, 3], and several proposals have been offered to secure BGP [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. Most of these proposed mechanisms rely on a PKI, to provide trusted inputs for routing security mechanisms, to enable BGP routers to reject bogus routing advertisements. This paper provides a detailed proposal for a PKI, including a repository system, representing IP address allocation and Autonomous System number assignment,. This infrastructure offers a near term opportunity to improve routing security, since it does not require changes to routers, while also setting the stage for more comprehensive BGP security initiatives in the future.