Let the Market Drive Deployment: A Strategy for Transitioning to BGP Security

With a cryptographic root-of-trust for Internet routing (RPKI) on the horizon, we can finally start planning the deployment of one of the secure interdomain routing protocols proposed over a decade ago (Secure BGP, secure origin BGP). However, if experience with IPv6 is any indicator, this will be no easy task. Security concerns alone seem unlikely to provide sufficient local incentive to drive the deployment process forward. Worse yet, the security benefits provided by the S*BGP protocols do not even kick in until a large number of ASes have deployed them.

Instead, we appeal to ISPs' interest in increasing revenue-generating traffic. We propose a strategy that governments and industry groups can use to harness ISPs' local business objectives and drive global S*BGP deployment. We evaluate our deployment strategy using theoretical analysis and large-scale simulations on empirical data. Our results give evidence that the market dynamics created by our proposal can transition the majority of the Internet to S*BGP.

Joint work with Sharon Goldberg and Michael Schapira