| Abstract | To protect against prefix hijacks, Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) has been standardized. To enjoy the security guarantees of RPKI validation, networks need to install a new component, the relying party validator, which fetches and validates RPKI objects and provides them to border routers. However, recent work shows that relying parties experience failures when retrieving RPKI objects and are vulnerable to attacks, all of which can disable RPKI validation. Therefore even the few adopters are not necessarily secure.
We make the first proposal that significantly improves the resilience and security of RPKI. We develop BRP, a Byzantine-Secure relying party implementation. In BRP the relying party nodes redundantly validate RPKI objects and reach a global consensus through voting. BRP provides an RPKI equivalent of public DNS, removing the need for networks to install, operate, and upgrade their own relying party instances while avoiding the need to trust operators of BRP nodes.
We show through simulations and experiments that BRP, as an intermediate RPKI service, results in less load on RPKI publication points and a robust output despite RPKI repository failures, jitter, and attacks. We engineer BRP to be fully backward compatible and readily deployable - it does not require any changes to the border routers and the RPKI repositories.
We demonstrate that BRP can protect many networks transparently, with either a decentralized or centralized deployment. BRP can be set up as a network of decentralized volunteer deployments, similarly to NTP and TOR, where different operators participate in the peering process with their node, and provide resilient and secure relying party validation to the Internet. BRP can also be hosted by a single operator as a centralized service, e.g., on one cloud or CDN, and provides RPKI validation benefits even when hosted on a single network. |
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