On Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:49:51 -0500 (EST) Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:
On Mon, 25 Feb 2008, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
How about state-of-the-art routing security?
The problem is what is the actual trust model?
Are you trusting some authority to not be malicious or never make a mistake?
There are several answers to the malicious problem.
There are fewer answers to never making a mistake problem.
The state of the art routing security proposals let the "trusted" securely make mistakes. At one time or another, I think every router vendor, every ASN operator, every RIR, and so on has made a mistake at some time.
Yeah, I know some of those mistakes may have actually been malicious, but so far the mistakes have outnumbered the malicious.
If someone comes up with the anti-mistake routing protocol ...
Right. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone is malicious. And the RIRs and the big ISPs are *generally* more clueful than the little guys and the newcomers. Note also that secured BGP limits the kinds of mistakes people can make. If I have a certificate from my RIR for 192.0.2.0/24, I can't neither announce 10.0.0.0/8 nor delegate it to you, no matter how badly I type. Secured BGP still strikes me as a net win. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb