Sharon Goldberg published in the Communications of ACM magazine
Professor Sharon Goldberg has been published in Communications of ACM, Volume 57, Number 10. Her article, Why is it taking so long to secure internet routing?, is about the vulnerability of BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), which plays a vital role in keeping the Internet together.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the glue that sticks the Internet together, enabling data communications between large networks operated by different organizations. BGP makes Internet communications global by setting up routes for traffic between organizations—for example, from Boston University’s network, through larger ISPs (Internet service providers) such as Level3, Pakistan Telecom, and China Telecom, then on to residential networks such as Comcast or enterprise networks such as Bank of America.
While BGP plays a crucial role in Internet communications, it remains surprisingly vulnerable to attack. The past few years have seen a range of routing incidents that highlight the fragility of routing with BGP. They range from a simple misconfiguration at a small Indonesian ISP that took Google offline in parts of Asia,32 to a case of BGP-based censorship that leaked out of Pakistan Telecom and took YouTube offline for most of the Internet,2 to a routing error that caused a large fraction of the world’s Internet traffic to be routed through China Telecom,6 to highly targeted traffic interception by networks in Iceland and Belarus.34
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?
The answer to this question lies in the fact that BGP is a global protocol, running across organizational and national borders. As such, it lacks a single centralized authority that can mandate the deployment of a security solution; instead, every organization can autonomously decide which routing security solutions it will deploy in its own network. Thus, the deployment becomes a coordination game among thousands of independently operated networks. This is further complicated by the fact that many security solutions do not work well unless a large number of networks deploy them.