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

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.