ABSTRACT Modeling Adoptability of Secure BGP Protocols.pdfVIP

Modeling Adoptability of Secure BGP Protocols? Haowen Chan, Debabrata Dash, Adrian Perrig, and Hui Zhang Carnegie Mellon University {haowenchan, ddash, perrig, hzhang}@ ABSTRACT Despite the existence of several secure BGP routing protocols, there has been little progress to date on actual adoption. Although feasi- bility for widespread adoption remains the greatest hurdle for BGP security, there has been little quantitative research into what prop- erties 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 at- tacker 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 devel- opment of more adoptable secure BGP protocols and demonstrate the importance of studying adoptability of protocols. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2 [Computer-Communication Networks]: General General Terms Security, Design Keywords Adoptability, Adoption dynamics, incentives-compatibility ? This research was supported in part by grants CNS-0433540 and ANI-0331653 from the National Science Foundation, and by a gift from Cisco. The views and conclusions contained here are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily represent- ing the official policies or endorsements, either ex