Improving Routing Security Using a Decentralized Public Key Distribution Algorithm

Today's society has developed a reliance on networking infrastructures. Health, financial, and many other institutions deploy mission critical and even life critical applications on local networks and the global Internet. The security of this infrastructure has been called into question over the last decade. In particular, the protocols directing traffic through the network have been found to be vulnerable. One such protocol is the open shortest path first (OSPF) protocol. This paper proposes a security extension to OSPF containing a decentralized certificate authentication scheme (DecentCA) that eliminates the single point of failure/attack present in current OSPF security extensions. An analysis of the security of the DecentCA is performed.