[LINK] Route Origin Verification

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Jeremy Kirk (IDG News Service) 27th April, 2012
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/422928/engineers_ponder_easier_fix_danger
ous_internet_problem/


Route Origin Verification  (ROVER)   http://rover.secure64.com  

"The ROVER specifications are currently in "internet daft" status before 
the Internet Engineering Task Force. The next step to becoming a standard 
is for a working group to adopt the documents"


IT engineers are studying what may be an easier way to fix a long-
existing weakness in the Internet's routing system that has the potential 
to cause major service outages and allow hackers to spy on data.

The problem involves the routers used by every organization and company 
that owns a block of IP addresses. 

Those routers communicate constantly with other routers, updating their 
internal information -- often upwards of 400,000 entries -- on the best 
way to reach other networks using a protocol called Border Gateway 
Protocol (BGP).

BGP enables routers to find the best path when, say, a network used to 
retrieve a web page from South Korea is not working properly. Changes in 
that routing information are distributed quickly to routers around the 
world in as few as five minutes.

But the routers do not verify that the route "announcements," as they are 
called, are correct. Mistakes in entering the information -- or worse 
yet, a malicious attack -- can cause a network to become unavailable.

It can also cause, for example, a company's Internet traffic to be 
circuitously routed through another network it does not need to go 
through, opening the possibility the traffic could be intercepted. 

The attack is known as "route hijacking," and can't be stopped by any 
security product.

When routing problems erupt, "it's very difficult to tell if this is fat 
fingering on a router or malicious," said Joe Gersch, chief operating 
officer for Secure64, a company that makes Domain Name System (DNS) 
server software. "It could be a trial run for cyberwarfare."

Data shows that as much as one-third of the world can't reach portions of 
the Internet at a time due to routing problems, Gersch said.

In February, a routing mistake caused the international traffic for 
Australian operator Telstra to go through its competitor's network, Dodo, 
which couldn't handle the traffic surge. 

In a well-known incident, Pakistan Telecom made an error with BGP after 
Pakistan's government ordered in 2008 that ISPs block YouTube, which 
ended up knocking Google's service offline.

In March 2011, a researcher noticed that traffic destined for Facebook on 
AT&T's network strangely went through China for a while. While the 
requests would normally go directly to Facebook's network provider, the 
traffic first went through China Telecom and then to SK Broadband in 
South Korea before routing to Facebook. Although the incident was 
characterized as a mistake, it would have been possible for unencrypted 
Facebook traffic to have been spied on.

"The broader problem here is that much of this critical infrastructure 
simply relies on players behaving correctly," said Dan Massey, an 
associate computer science professor at Colorado State University. 

"In a truly global system like the internet, you must assume that 
organizations will occasionally make unintentional mistakes."

But "imagine what a determined adversary might be able to do," Massey 
said. That could include attacks on critical infrastructure, such as 
power plants, which have become increasingly reliant on the Internet.

The solution is to have routers verify that the IP address blocks 
announced by others routers actually belong to their networks. 

One method, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), uses a system of 
cryptographic certificates that verify an IP address block indeed belongs 
to a certain network.

RPKI is complex, and deployment has been slow. 

Experts recently came up with an alternate system, nicknamed ROVER for 
Route Origin Verification, that may be easier. 

ROVER stores the legitimate route information within the DNS, the 
enormous distributed database that translates a domain name into an IP 
address that can be called into a browser. That route information can be 
signed with DNSSEC, the security protocol that allows DNS records to be 
cryptographically signed, which is being widely adopted.

The advantages with ROVER are that no changes need to be made to existing 
routers, and it can work alongside RPKI. "The whole infrastructure of 
securing the answer [of whether the route is legitimate] already exists," 
said Gersch, who has authored two specifications for how to name a route 
and the type of record that could be inserted into the DNS. 

The specifications are currently in "internet daft" status before the 
Internet Engineering Task Force. The next step to becoming a standard is 
for a working group to adopt the documents, Gersch said.

--

Cheers
Stephen