Securing BGP Networks using Consistent Check Algorithm

Abstract—The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the critical routing protocol in the Internet infrastructure. However, there is no security concern in the original design of BGP, which suffers from various kinds of threats for attacks. To secure the BGP operation, this paper proposes an algorithm called consistent check. The algorithm is to verify the correctness of AS path in an incoming BGP update message by consulting the knowledge of other autonomous systems in the network. Unlike existing solution, this proposed algorithm does not require the need of cryptography calculation. When a router finds that its AS number has already been included in the AS path, it rejects the route information in order to prevent the formulation of a routing loop. However, BGP can only detect loops among autonomous systems and it cannot ensure there is no loop within an AS. In an update message, apart from prefixes, BGP attributes are included to provide additional information about those prefixes, such as path preference and aggregation information. A. BGP basic I.