Decentralised Trust on Internet Infrastructure: Securing Inter-Domain Routing

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) glues the Internet, it provides reachability and routing to the building blocks of the Internet, networks referred as Autonomous Systems (ASes). BGP was not designed with security in mind, and as a consequence it contains critical security issues that can affect the Internet infrastructure. There have been several instances of attackers exploiting such security issues that have resulted in important disruption of services provided over the Internet. The most common security threats are: (i) prefix hijacking: where an attacker takes over control over a set of IP addresses (ii) path hijack: where attackers control the path of the flow of information between ASes and (iii) route leaks, where an AS announces a path incorrectly. Give the importance of the security of BGP for the entire Internet infrastructure, research efforts have been devoted to mitigate such attacks. Existing proposals aims to secure BGP by using a standard centralized Public Key Infrastructure approach. In this talk we will show how BGP can be secured using a decentralised approach. By taking advantage of Decentralized Ledger Technologies, we research and design a Decentralized Internet Infrastructure that effectively protects BGP against all three attacks: prefix hijack, path hijack and route leaks. In addition, we have built a prototype and at the end of the talk we will briefly demonstrate how it works.