Securing BGP using blockchain technology

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is an important routing protocol used to exchange routing information among autonomous systems on the Internet. The BGP version 4 does not include specific protection mechanisms against attacks or deliberate errors that could cause disruptions of routing behavior. There were several securing solutions developed to mitigate security issues of BGP. In this thesis, current secure solutions are reviewed and evaluated against a list of security and deployment requirements. Furthermore, a new BGP securing solution is proposed which uses blockchain technology and smart contracts to exchange information required for messages validation among peers. This allows to decouple security-related data from the protocol itself and fix the problems introduced in other BGP solutions