U.S. Plots Major Upgrade to Internet Router Security Network World (01/15/09) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy
as it appeared in the January 16, 2009 edition of ACM TechNews.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to quadruple its investment in research dedicated to securing the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) by adding digital signatures to router communications. DHS says the research initiative, dubbed BGPSEC, will prevent routing hijackings and accidental misconfigurations of routing data. DHS expects BGPSEC to take several years to develop prototypes and standards and at least four years before deployment. Experts have praised the accelerated effort, as BGP is one of the Internet's most vulnerable faults. "The reason BGP problems are so serious is that they attack the Internet infrastructure, rather than particular hosts," says Columbia University professor of computer science Steve Bellovin. "This is why it is a DHS-type of problem." Arbor Networks' Danny McPherson says BGP is one of the largest threats on the Internet. "There doesn't exist a formally verifiable source for who owns what address space on the Internet, and absent that you can't really validate the routing system," McPherson says. The extra funding should enable the DHS to develop ways of authenticating Internet Protocol (IP) address allocations and router announcements on how to reach blocks of IP addresses. DHS funding for router security will rise to approximately $2.5 million per year beginning this year, up from about $600,000 per year over the last three years, says Douglas Maughan, DHS program manager for cybersecurity research and development. View Full Article
