Modeling adoptability of secure BGP protocol

Abstract

Despite the existence of several secure BGP routing protocols, there has been little progress to date on actual adoption. Although feasibility for widespread adoption remains the greatest hurdle for BGP security, there has been little quantitative research into what properties contribute the most to the adoptability of a security scheme. In this paper, we provide a model for assessing the adoptability of a secure BGP routing protocol. We perform this evaluation by simulating incentives compatible adoption decisions of ISPs on the Internet under a variety of assumptions. Our results include: (a) the existence of a sharp threshold, where, if the cost of adoption is below the threshold, complete adoption takes place, while almost no adoption takes place above the threshold; (b) under a strong attacker model, adding a single hop of path authentication to origin authentication yields similar adoptability characteristics as a full path security scheme; (c) under a weaker attacker model, adding full path authentication (e.g., via S-BGP [9]) significantly improves the adoptability of BGP security over weaker path security schemes such as soBGP [16]. These results provide insight into the development of more adoptable secure BGP protocols and demonstrate the importance of studying adoptability of protocols.