Pretty good BGP: Improving BGP by cautiously adopting routes

Josh Karlin, Stephanie Forrest, Jennifer Rexford

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

141 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Internet's interdomain routing protocol, BGP, is vulnerable to a number of damaging attacks, which often arise from operator misconfiguration. Proposed solutions with strong guarantees require a public-key infrastructure, accurate routing registries, and changes to BGP. However, BGP routers can avoid selecting and propagating these routes if they are cautious about adopting new reachability information. We describe a protocolpreserving enhancement to BGP, Pretty Good BGP (PGBGP), that slows the dissemination of bogus routes, providing network operators time to respond before problems escalate into large-scale Internet attacks. Simulation results show that realistic deployments of PGBGP could provide 99% of Autonomous Systems with 24 hours to investigate and repair bogus routes without affecting prefix reachability. We also show that without PGBGP, 40% of ASs cannot avoid selecting bogus routes; with PGBGP, this number drops to less than 1%. Finally, we show that PGBGP is incrementally deployable and offers significant security benefits to early adopters and their customers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 14th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP 2006
Pages290-299
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
Event14th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP 2006 - Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Duration: Nov 12 2006Nov 15 2006

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP
ISSN (Print)1092-1648

Other

Other14th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP 2006
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara, CA
Period11/12/0611/15/06

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Engineering

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