Keychain-Based Signatures for Securing BGP

Abstract

Abstract-As a major component of Internet routing infrastructure, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is vulnerable to malicious attacks. While Secure BGP (S-BGP) provides a comprehensive framework to secure BGP, its high computational cost and low incremental deployment benefits seriously impede its wide usage in practice. Using a lightweight symmetric signature scheme, SPV is much faster than S-BGP. However, the speed boost comes at the price of prohibitively large signatures. Aggregated path authentication reduces the overhead of securing BGP in terms of both time and space, but the speed improvement is still limited by public key computation. In this paper, we propose a keychain-based signature scheme called KC-x. It has low CPU and memory overheads and provides strong incentive for incremental deployment on the Internet. As a generic framework, KC-x has the flexibility of using different signature algorithms, which can even co-exist in a hybrid deployment. We investigate two implementations of KC-x: KC-RSA based on RSA and KC-MT based on Merkle hash tree. Using real BGP workloads, our experimental results show that KC-RSA is as efficient as SAS-V (the most efficient software approach for aggregated path authentication), and KC-MT is even three times faster than SPV with 40% smaller signatures. Through the hybrid deployment of KC-MT and KC-RSA, KC-x can achieve both small signature and high processing rate for BGP speakers.

The state of affairs in BGP security: A survey of attacks and defenses

“…The authors also argued that some standard digital signatures are as efficient as one-time signatures with respect to route validation. Based on this, Yin et al [104] further optimized the performance of the signature generation and verification algorithms used in SPV, and also reduced the size of the created signatures.…”

3S: three-signature path authentication for BGP security

“…Yin et al . proposed a keychain‐based signature scheme for path authentication , with low CPU and memory overheads that can achieve small signature for BGP speakers. The performance of the keychain‐based signature scheme is as efficient as the aggregated path authentication.…”