NRV: Leveraging Secure Multi-Party Computation for Lightweight BGP Security Enhancement

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto standard interdomain routing protocol. A major problem affecting the operation of BGP is its failure to provide security guarantees. Despite some high-profile security extensions proposed, none of them has been largely deployed by Autonomous Systems (AS) in the global Internet. Previous studies show that three main factors hinder the adoption of BGP security solutions: limited benefits in partial deployment, computational overheads, and the trouble of coordinating among tens of thousands of independent ASes. In this paper, we present Neighbor Routes Validator (NRV), a lightweight prototype system of BGP security enhancement. Instead of depending on a single centralized authority, NRV focuses on neighboring ASes’ self-driven collaborations that significantly reduce the scale of coordination. It aims to address real-world security issues of BGP and uses the privacy-preserving capability of Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) to dispel ASes’ privacy concerns. Security analyses and simulations demonstrate the feasibility of NRV, and we also argue that network operators have incentives to deploy it after weighing the pros and cons.