[#135346] Unauthorized BGP Announcements (follow up to Hijacked

Randy Bush randy at psg.com
Fri Feb 3 07:02:03 UTC 2012


> I hear there's this thing called RPKI that does origin validation

<pedantic>

well, not exactly.  to quote myself from the other week in another forum

--

Just to be clear, as people keep calling BGP security 'RPKI'

In the current taxonomy, there are three pieces, the RPKI, RPKI-based
origin validation, and then path validation.

RPKI is the X.509 based hierarchy with is congruent with the internet IP
address allocation administration, the IANA, RIRS, ISPs, ...  It is the
substrate on which the next two are based.  It is currently deployed in
four of the five administrative regions, ARIN in North America being the
sad and embarrassing exception.

RPKI-based origin validation uses some of the RPKI data to allow a
router to verify that the autonomous system announcing an IP address
prefix is in fact authorized to do so.  This is not crypto checked so
can be violated.  But it prevents the vast majority of accidental
'hijackings' on the internet today, e.g. the famous Pakastani accidental
announcement of YouTube's address space.  RPKI-based origin validation
is in shipping code from Cisco, and will be shipping by Juniper in q2.

Path validation uses the full crypto information of the RPKI to make up
for the embarrassing mistake that, like much of the internet BGP was
designed with no thought to securing the BGP protocol itself from being
gamed/violated.  It allows a receiver of a BGP announcement to formally
cryptographically validate that the originating autonomous system was
truely authorized to announce the IP address prefix, and that the
systems through which the announcement passed were indeed those which
the sender/forwarder at each hop intended.

Sorry to drone on, but these three really need to be differentiated.

randy




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