Cameron Morris (University of Connecticut), Amir Herzberg (University of Connecticut), Bing Wang (University of Connecticut), Samuel Secondo (University of Connecticut)
We present BGP-iSec, an enhancement of the BGPsec protocol for securing BGP, the Internet's inter-domain routing protocol. BGP-iSec ensures additional and stronger security properties, compared to BGPsec, without significant extra overhead. The main improvements are: (i) Security for partial adoption: BGP-iSec provides significant security benefits for early adopters, in contrast to BGPsec, which requires universal adoption. (ii) Defense against route leakage: BGP-iSec defends against route leakage, a common cause of misrouting that is not prevented by BGPsec. (iii) Integrity of attributes: BGP-iSec ensures the integrity of revertible attributes, thereby preventing announcement manipulation attacks not prevented by BGPsec. We show that BGP-iSec achieves these goals using extensive simulations as well as security analysis. The BGP-iSec design conforms, where possible, with the BGPsec design, modifying it only where necessary to improve security. By providing stronger security guarantees, especially for partial adoption, we hope BGP-iSec will be a step towards finally protecting inter-domain routing, which remains, for many years, a vulnerability of the Internet's infrastructure.