Open Access

REVIEW

Towards Blockchain-Based Secure BGP Routing, Challenges and Future Research Directions

by Qiong Yang¹, Li Ma^1,2,*, Shanshan Tu¹, Sami Ullah³, Muhammad Waqas^4,5, Hisham Alasmary⁶

1 Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, 100124, China
2 School of Information Science and Technology, North China University of Technology, Beijing, 100144, China
3 Department of Computer Science, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University, Sheringal, 18050, Pakistan
4 School of Computing and Mathematical Science, Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Greenwich, London, SE10 9LS, UK
5 School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University, Perth, 6027, Australia
6 Department of Computer Science, King Khalid University, Abha, 61421, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Li Ma. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2024, 79(2), 2035-2062. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2024.049970

Received 23 January 2024; Accepted 04 March 2024; Issue published 15 May 2024

Abstract

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standard inter-domain routing protocol for the Internet that conveys network layer reachability information and establishes routes to different destinations. The BGP protocol exhibits security design defects, such as an unconditional trust mechanism and the default acceptance of BGP route announcements from peers by BGP neighboring nodes, easily triggering prefix hijacking, path forgery, route leakage, and other BGP security threats. Meanwhile, the traditional BGP security mechanism, relying on a public key infrastructure, faces issues like a single point of failure and a single point of trust. The decentralization, anti-tampering, and traceability advantages of blockchain offer new solution ideas for constructing secure and trusted inter-domain routing mechanisms. In this paper, we summarize the characteristics of BGP protocol in detail, sort out the BGP security threats and their causes. Additionally, we analyze the shortcomings of the traditional BGP security mechanism and comprehensively evaluate existing blockchain-based solutions to address the above problems and validate the reliability and effectiveness of blockchain-based BGP security methods in mitigating BGP security threats. Finally, we discuss the challenges posed by BGP security problems and outline prospects for future research.

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Keywords

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