Design and analysis of the Secure Border Gateway Protocol (S-BGP)

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to distribute routing information between autonomous systems (ASes), is a critical component of the Internet's routing infrastructure. It is highly vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks, due to the lack of a secure means of verifying the authenticity and legitimacy of BGP control traffic. This paper describes a secure, scalable, deployable architecture, S-BGP, for a system that addresses most of the security problems associated with BGP. The paper discusses the vulnerabilities and security requirements associated with BGP, describes the S-BGP countermeasures, and explains how they address these vulnerabilities and requirements. The paper also provides a comparison of this architecture with other approaches that have been proposed, analyzes the performance implications of the proposed countermeasures, and reports on prototype implementation experience.