Feds Plot Massive Internet Router Security Upgrade

BobB-nw writes "The U.S. federal government is accelerating its efforts to secure the Internet's routing system, with plans this year for the Department of Homeland Security to quadruple its investment in research aimed at adding digital signatures to router communications. DHS says its routing security effort will prevent routing hijack attacks as well as accidental misconfigurations of routing data. The effort is nicknamed BGPSEC because it will secure the Internet's core routing protocol known as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). (A separate federal effort is under way to bolster another Internet protocol, DNS, and it is called DNSSEC.) Douglas Maughan, program manager for cybersecurity R&D in the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, says his department's spending on router security will rise from around $600,000 per year during the last three years to approximately $2.5 million per year starting in 2009."

Comments

Re:It's a plot!

[Stile 65]

I think it's actually referring to S-BGP. I also thought it was just the MD5 signature option, but it's not.

Then again, one of the comments in TFA is that it won't require any new software or hardware to be installed, so maybe it IS just the MD5 option. The features didn't sound like it; it sounded like they were establishing a whole PKI.