Evaluating the Performance Impact of PKI on BGP Security
Meiyuan Zhaoand, Sean W. Smith, David M. Nicol · 2005
The Border Gateway Protocol is central to making the Internet work. However, because it relies on routers from many organizations believing and passing along information they receive, it is vulnerable to many security attacks. Approaches to securing BGP typically rely on public key cryptography, in various encodings, to mitigate these risks; to work in practice, these approaches usually require public key infrastructure. This cryptography and the PKI may both potentially impact the performance of this security scheme; however, evaluating how these effects may scale to large networks is diffi cult to do analytically or empirically. In this paper, we use the tools of simulation to evaluate the impact that signatures, verification, and certificat e handling have on convergence time, message size, and storage, for the principal approaches to securing BGP.