Aggregated Path Authentication for Efficient BGP Security Dartmouth Technical Report TR2005-541 Meiyuan Zhao Sean W. Smith David M. Nicol Date: May 2005 URL (PDF): (176KB) Abstract: The border gateway protocol (BGP) controls inter-domain routing in the Internet. BGP is vulnerable to many attacks, since routers rely on hearsay information from neighbors. Secure BGP (S-BGP) uses DSA to provide route authentication and mitigate many of these risks. However, many performance and deployment issues prevent S-BGP's real-world deployment. Previous work has explored improving S-BGP processing latencies, but space problems, such as increased message size and memory cost, remain the major obstacles. In this paper, we combine two efficient cryptographic techniques---signature amortization and aggregate signatures---to design new aggregated path authentication schemes. We propose six constructions for aggregated path authentication that substantially improve efficiency of S-BGP's path authentication on both speed and space criteria. Our performance evaluation shows that the new schemes achieve such an efficiency that they may overcome the space obstacles and provide a real-world practical solution for BGP security.