Jumpstarting Secure Interdomain Routing

Despite extensive efforts to secure the interdomain routing system, it might take many years to protect the Internet from devastating attacks such as IP-prefix hijacking, whereas security against more sophisticated attacks on BGP is even further afar. We present a new paradigm for securing interdomain routing that bypasses the obstacles facing today's agenda. Unlike the hierarchical RPKI approach to certifying IP prefixes, our design is flat, decentralized, fully-automated, and avoids dependency on a single root-of-trust. Moreover, in contrast to proposed secure routing protocols (e.g., BGPSEC and soBGP), our design is easily deployable and, in particular, does not require changing/replacing legacy BGP routers. We present the results of security analysis, extensive simulations, and experiments with a prototype implementation. Our results suggest that it is remarkably effective even with a modest number of adopting parties.