Why Is It Taking So Long To Secure Internet Routing?

CowboyRobot writes: We live in an imperfect world where routing-security incidents can still slip past deployed security defenses, and no single routing-security solution can prevent every attacks. Research suggests, however, that the combination of RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) with prefix filtering could significantly improve routing security; both solutions are based on whitelisting techniques and can reduce the number of autonomous systems that are impacted by prefix hijacks, route leaks, and path-shortening attacks. "People have been aware of BGP’s security issues for almost two decades and have proposed a number of solutions, most of which apply simple and well-understood cryptography or whitelisting techniques. Yet, many of these solutions remain undeployed (or incompletely deployed) in the global Internet, and the vulnerabilities persist. Why is it taking so long to secure BGP?"

Comments

It's a production system

[NFN_NLN]

The internet is in production. No one wants to touch anything that's already in production unless they literally can't make it any worse.
Otherwise we would have IPv6 as well.

trust

[dremspider]

Most of these solutions require some sort of central authority to manage the security of all the routes. Sounds great until you realize that there is no one that all the users of the Internet can trust. I am not even sure that users can trust their own governments to manage this without exploiting users for the sake of surveillance let alone other countries trust one another. If you can't trust one another the best thing to do is remain insecure but watch each other like hawks for any foul play.

Not a Problem, submitter doesn't understand

[BitZtream]

Its not actually a problem, thats why. The submitter doesn't actually understand what he's suggesting and why the current method of dealing with this issue works fine.

You know who is doing the damage and 'attacking' you, they are easy to identify, and you just stop talking to them. They're only going to connect to a relatively small number of people so disconnecting bad players is trivial, then you never talk to them again. They bare the cost of having all the money invested in setting up the original connections they used to 'attack' with being lost. And lets be clear, BGP attacks aren't done via virtual connections, they're done across physical connections so you know EXACTLY who is doing them and which cable to unplug to solve the problem.

Do you upgrade every router running BGP, or just turn off the 2 connections to the bad guy? Its just not worth the effort to 'fix the problem' with a technical solution when good old fashion common sense tactics work just as well and for far less cost (read: effort for everyone involved) Even if it were a major backbone provider, the number of connections to cut is still trivial compared to even upgrading all the routers that the single largest backbone providers connect to.

This is a stupid question to ask and just illustrates not understanding the actual problem. The costs of 'fixing' the problem technical FAR outweighs the benefits of doing so (not having to manually disconnect troublesome players).