soBGP deployment

Mon May 23 17:37:52 UTC 2005

On Mon, 23 May 2005, Edward Lewis wrote:

> 1) Keep the security ancillary data nearby.  You might need it when the 
> source of the data is unreachable (perhaps because of an incident like a 
> flood).

That is why in my view soBGP is something that can only be deployed as an 
after-filter (i.e. ones full BGP mesh is in for decisions about if the 
routing data is to be passed along to other peers or to IGP).

> 2) Appending signatures is dicey.  It has to be all public key and there's 
> never a guarantee that the latest signer hasn't stripped out previous 
> entries.  (That could make a longer path seem shorter in order to redirect 
> traffic.)
>
> IMHO - the inherent problem is that a router is trying to work inside the 
> plane of activity (meaning it can only talk to it's nearest neighbors), but 
> it takes the view point of something with ubiquitous knowledge to know if 
> every thing is cool.  How can you do this without a trusted third party 
> involved somewhere, in a way that is not obtrusive (whether at registration 
> time or at run time)?

You do need "trusted third party" to act as PKI root signer. We're lucky
because unlike other places, we do have hierarchy with ip addresses and
ASNs and NIR is the "root" organization.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net