Security analysis of C-BGP: A light alternative to S-BGP

Abstract

Credible BGP (C-BGP) is a lightweight alternative to secure BGP. Its main design objective is to address signature verification costs and deployment challenges associated with S-BGP. To this end, C-BGP defines a control layer of trusted ASes that is comprised of major Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the network. In this environment a non-trusted AS has to verify only the signatures of intermediate ASes between itself and the last trusted AS in the AS-PATH. Similarly, the address prefix is validated only if it was not previously validated by a trusted AS. This scheme works very well as long as the trusted ASes are indeed always trustworthy. In this paper we aim to study security impact of malicious trusted AS(es) in the network. We develop original and detailed analytical and simulation models to study the security of C-BGP and demonstrate that it promises very significant savings in terms of computational overhead and acceptable security performance in the presence of malicious ASes in the network.