At NANOG on the Road (NotR) in September of 2018, I participated in a panel on BGP security—specifically the deployment of Route Origin Authentication (ROA), with some hints and overtones of path validation by carrying signatures in BGP updates (BGPsec). This is an area I have been working in for… 20 years? ... at this point, so I have seen the argument develop across these years many times, and in many ways. What always strikes me about this discussion, whenever and wherever it is aired, is the clash between business realities and the desire for “someone to do something about routing security in the DFZ, already!” What also strikes me about these conversations it the number of times very fundamental concepts end up being explained to folks who are “new to the problem.”

TL;DR
–this will take more than 5 minutes to read–

• BGP security is a business problem first, and a technology problem second
• Signed information is only useful insofar as it is maintained
• The cost of deployment must be lower than the return on that cost
• Local policy will always override global policy—as it should
• The fear of losing business is a stronger motivator than gaining new business

Part of the problem here is solutions considered “definitive and final” have been offered, the operator community has rejected them for many years, and yet these same solutions are put on the table year after year—like the perennial fruit cake made by someone’s great great aunt in the mists of Christmastime history that has been regifted so many times no-one really remembers where it came from, nor what sorts of fruit it actually contains.

The business reality, in terms of BGP security, is simple. To deploy some sort of check on the global routing table, a point must be reached where it costs more to not deploy it than to deploy it. This simple business reality is something network designers and architects beat their heads against every day. The solution can be the neatest solution in the world. It might even shop for the ingredients, mix the cookie dough in perfect proportions, bake the cookies, and then transport them to the proper location for the perfect amount of enjoyment from just the right people (insert Goldilocks here, perhaps). But none of this will ever matter if there is no financial upside, or if the financial risks are greater than the financial gains.

So, some hopefully helpful business realities.

Signed information is no more useful than unsigned information if it is not kept up to date. It is great to get everyone out in full force to build a cryptographically secured database of who owns what prefixes and AS numbers. It is wonderful to find a way to distribute that information throughout the ‘net so people can use it as another tool to determine whether or not to accept a route, or what weight to place on that route. People might even spend a bit of time building this database, just because they believe it is good for the community.

The problem is not day one. It is day two, and then day two thousand. What motivation is there to keep the information in this database up-to-date? Unless there is some—and here I mean financial motivation—the database will lose its effectiveness over time. At some point, when the error rate reaches some number (around 30% seems to be about right), people will simply stop trusting it. When the error rate gets high enough, the tools will stop being used, and the ‘net will revert to its old self.

The cost of deployment and operation must at least be close to the gains from deployment. At this point, there is no financial gain any one company can see from deploying anything in the realm of BGP security, so the cost of deployment and maintenance must be close to zero. While there are folks (including me) trying to reduce the cost as close to zero as possible, we are not there yet, and I do not know if we will ever be there.

Local policy will always override global policy. The literature of BGP security is replete with statements like: “if the route meets this criteria, the BGP speaker MUST drop it.” Good luck. The Internet is a confederation of independent companies, each of which runs their network in a way that they believe will make the most money at the lowest cost possible. One of the ways this happens is that people tune their local policies to charge their adjacent autonomous systems as much money as possible while reducing their OPEX and CAPEX as much as possible. There will always be money to be made in the grey space around local tuning of policies for optimal traffic flow. Hence local policy will always win over what any database anyplace might say.

To give a specific example: assume you run a network, and you have peered with another operator in multiple places for many years. You know the other operator’s routes well, as they have not changed for many years. One day, you receive a route from this operator in which everything looks correct, but the route is not contained in this outside database of “correct routes.”

Noting this route is a route you have received from this very same operator for many years, are you going to drop it because it’s not right in some database, or are you going to use it given your past standing and relationship?

The fear of losing business is always the strongest motivator. Which leads to the next issue. It does not matter how wonderful your network is if you have a high customer churn rate. The most certain way to have a high churn rate is to place your customer’s experience in the hands of someone else. Such as a communally managed database, perhaps. This is another reason why local policy will always win over remote policy—the local provider is handed checks by customers, not the community at large. They have more incentive to keep their customers happy than the community.

You cannot secure things you do not tell anyone about. This final one is probably not as obvious as the others, but it is just as important as any other item on this list. There are many backdoor arrangements and sealed contracts in the provider world. People transit traffic without telling anyone else that traffic is being transited. Some people are customers of others only in the event of a massive failure someplace else in their network but do not want anyone to know about this.

All of these arrangements are perfectly legitimate and legal in their respective jurisdictions. But you cannot secure something that no-one knows about. The more information that is hidden in a system, the harder it is to validate the information that exists is correct.

The bottom line is this: BGP security, like most networking problems, is not a technology problem. BGP security is, at its heart, a business problem. The lesson is here not just for security, but for network engineering in general. Business is the bottom line, not technology.