Inter-Domain Prefix and Route Validation Using Fast and Scalable DAG Based Distributed Ledger for Secure BGP Routing

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the default inter-domain routing protocol on the Internet, lacks inherent mechanisms to validate the prefix ownership and integrity of inter-domain routes exchanged among multiple domains, resulting in BGP hijack attacks. Conventional security approaches such as RPKI and BGPSec are centralized and complex by nature, and require changes to existing routing infrastructure. In recent times, blockchain based solutions are proposed for validating the routing information exchanged across different domains in a decentralized manner. However, because of lower transaction throughput, longer confirmation time and huge storage overhead, the existing solutions are not suitable for validating the routing information exchanged among domains, where a large number of prefix allocations and BGP route advertisements are recorded as transactions on the blockchain. This work proposes an Inter-domain Prefix and Route Validation (IPRV) framework for validating prefix ownership and inter-domain routes exchanged among the domains on the Internet. IPRV leverages (a) Fast and Scalable Directed Acyclic Graph-based Distributed Ledger (FSD2L) to record transactions corresponding to the prefix allocations and BGP route advertisements made by different domains on the Internet, and (b) Route Validation Nodes (RVNs) which maintain FSD2L to provide prefix and route validation services to the BGP routers within a domain. IPRV framework is implemented and verified using docker containers, and the simulations performed on large inter-domain networks showed that the proposed IPRV framework using RVNs and FSD2L achieves high transaction throughput while minimizing the storage consumption of the FSD2L. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature