TC: Small: Deployment Incentives for Secure Internet Routing

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

Despite a decade of research, the problem of securing the Internet's interdomain routing system is far from solved. For a long time, it seemed there was a problem of technical feasibility; research focused on designing more and more lightweight protocols, by reducing computational or communication overheads, or considering weaker security guarantees. It has now become clear that the challenge of deploying these protocols is not one of technical feasibility, but one of incentives. The Internet is a complex, distributed system that is not controlled by any one entity, but instead has thousands of players with different economic incentives. The real challenge is to create incentives for these players to band together and deploy a secure routing protocol that will significantly improve the reliability and security of the Internet. To address this challenge, this project develops: (a) Metrics for measuring the utility of different network security protocols, (b) Algorithms that identify a target set of Autonomous Systems (ASes) in the Internet that should be initially convinced or incentivized to adopt the new security protocols, so that the rest of the Internet has the incentive to follow suit, (c) Guidelines for using secure routing protocols when they are partially deployed in the Internet, (d) Models for evaluating improvements in security as ASes gradually deploy the protocol. The approaches in this project combine domain knowledge and validation on real network data, with problem formulations inspired by emerging ideas from cryptography, game theory, and the literature on social networks.