Path diversity for Inter-domain Routing security

Abdul Wahab Basit, Naveed Ahmed · 2017

The backbone of the Internet consists of a large number of autonomous systems (ASs), which are interconnected by Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) and mutual peering arrangements. The de-facto routing protocol, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), has well-known vulnerabilities. Secure versions of BGP are costly and their adoption is slow1. Technology migration towards Software-defined Networking (SDN) does not automatically ensure routing security, nevertheless it opens door for innovation due to centralized control of IP routing. In this paper we propose multipath routing to secure global IP traffic from malicious ASes and IXPs, by leveraging the logically centralized control plane (LCCP) of SDN. LCCP is well suited to implement IXP-centric path diversity, which not only increases the routing security but also brings in greater resilience and higher performance. We present a graph theoretic model of core networking along with a multipath routing algorithm suitable for LCCP. We integrate our proposed ideas with multipath TCP (RFC 6824) and demonstrate the working of proposed multipath routing in a detailed Mininet emulation.

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