Abstract
The whole Internet consists of thousands of autonomous systems that transfer data with one another. The BGP plays a significant role in routing, but its behaviour is essentially naive, trusting neighbours without authenticating advertised IP prefixes. This is the main reason why BGP endures various path manipulation attacks. Recently, conventional methods for securing BGP have been implemented, i.e., BGPSec with RPKI. However, these approaches are centralised with a single point of failure that may be compromised, invalidating the whole security mechanism. There have been multiple decentralised projects dealing with various mechanisms, mostly built on Ethereum and blockchain networks. Some with ambition to strengthen existing centralised mechanisms, others to replace them. In this article, we present the first comprehensive survey on blockchain solutions to enforce BGP security, with complex explanations of their contributions and a comparison with different aspects. We explain how blockchain technology can provide an alternative to prevent the false origin of IP prefixes or hijacking AS paths. Moreover, we describe new blockchain-based attacks that BGP would face after the inclusion of blockchain into the inter-domain routing. Finally, we answer the defined research questions and discuss the potential open issues for further study.
Highlights
The whole Internet consists of thousands of networks called autonomous systems.The data are transferred between them through paths that are determined by the routing process
We describe the security of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and provide a general overview of existing BGP attacks; We present the benefits of blockchain technology and smart contracts as well as their possible drawbacks; We summarise the recent works on blockchain that enhance the security of BGP, and we discuss their technical characteristics and limitations; We analyse the protection of the autonomous system (AS) path against any modification, and we investigate the scalability of those implementations; We answer the defined research questions, and we mention the potential open issues for improvement of the field
We summarise the following key findings in regards to the research questions based on the analysis of projects concerning blockchain assets for inter-domain environments presented in the previous section
Summary
The whole Internet consists of thousands of networks called autonomous systems. The data are transferred between them through paths that are determined by the routing process. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enables the exchange of routing information among the autonomous systems to create paths for transferring data [1]. The distributed ledger called blockchain has became a popular technology thanks to Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It introduced peer-to-peer payments in the digital world. Before we decide to deploy blockchain technology, we should meet the following assumptions [2]:
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