Decentralised Internet infrastructure: Securing inter-domain routing (DEMO)

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the inter-domain routing protocol that glues the Internet. BGP does not incorporate security and instead, it relies on careful configuration and manual filtering to offer some protection. As a consequence, the current inter-domain routing infrastructure is partially vulnerable to prefix and path hijacks as well as in misconfigurations that results in route leaks. There are many instances of these vulnerabilities being exploited by malicious actors on the Internet, resulting in disruption of services. To address this issue the IETF has designed RPKI, a centralised trust architecture that relies on Public Key Infrastructure. RPKI has slow adoption and its centralised nature is problematic: network administrators are required to trust CAs and do not have the ultimate control of their own critical Internet resources (e.g,. IP blocks, AS Numbers). In this context, we have built the Decentralised Internet Infrastructure (DII), a distributed ledger to securely store inter-domain routing information. The main advantages of DII are (i) it offers flexible trust models where the Internet community can define the rules of a consensus algorithm that properly reflects the power balance of its members and, (ii) offers protection against vulnerabilities (path hijack and route leaks) that goes well beyond what RPKI offers. We have deployed the prototype on the wild in a worldwide testbed including 7 ASes, we will use the testbed to demonstrate in a realistic scenario how allocation and delegation of Internet resources in DII work, and how this protects ASes against artificially produced path and prefix hijack as well as a route leak.