A Secure and Scalable Internet Routing Architecture (SIRA)

Today’s Internet routing architecture faces many challenges, ranging from scaling problems, security threats, poor fault diagnosis to inadequate support for traffic engineering and customer multihoming. By analyzing these challenges and learning lessons from previously proposed solutions, we gain two fundamental insights for designing a secure and scal-able routing architecture: cutting a clear boundary between customer networks and transit providers, and embedding es-sential information in the address structure. We propose the Secure and Scalable Internet Routing Architecture (SIRA), a clean-slate design that separates provider networks from customer networks and embeds organization and location information in address structure. The resulting system pro-vides dramatic improvements in scalability, security, fault diagnosis, and multihoming and traffic engineering support. We also identify new design issues raised by SIRA and sketch out straw-man solutions. 1