A Survey of BGP Security Issues and Solutions

As the Internet's de facto interdomain routing protocol, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the glue that holds the disparate parts of the Internet together. A major limitation of BGP is its failure to adequately address security. Recent high-profile outages and security analyses clearly indicate that the Internet routing infrastructure is highly vulnerable. Moreover, the design of BGP and the ubiquity of its deployment have frustrated past efforts at securing interdomain routing. This paper considers the current vulnerabilities of the interdomain routing system and surveys both research and standardization efforts relating to BGP security. We explore the limitations and advantages of proposed security extensions to BGP, and explain why no solution has yet struck an adequate balance between comprehensive security and deployment cost.

I. Introduction

The Internet is a global, decentralized network comprised of many smaller interconnected networks. Networks are largely comprised of end systems, referred to as hosts, and intermediate systems, called routers. Information travels through a network on one of many paths, which are selected through a routing process. Routing protocols communicate reachability information (how to locate other hosts and routers) and ultimately perform path selection. A network under the administrative control of a single organization is called an autonomous system (AS) [1]. The process of routing within an AS is called intradomain routing, and routing between ASes is called interdomain routing. The dominant interdomain routing protocol on the Internet is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [2]. BGP has been deployed since the commercialization of the Internet, and version 4 of the protocol has been in wide use for over a decade. BGP generally works well in practice, and its operational simplicity and resilience have enabled it to play a fundamental role within the global Internet [3], despite providing no performance or security guarantees.