Internet routing security is one of the pressing issues in the Internet. It encompasses the correct announcement and propagation of IP prefixes between the domains or — using the Internet terminology — Autonomous Systems (AS).
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is the protocol that manages the advertisement and propagation of prefixes between the different domains.
BGP configuration is mostly done via out-of-band mechanisms where network operators tell each other which prefixes to announce among themselves. Hence, an accidental misconfiguration or a malicious attacker controlling a BGP router can divert traffic to networks which should not receive it or make ranges of IP addresses unavailable (and effectively denying global services). This attack is commonly known as BGP hijacking and can be accomplished forging BGP announcements and propagating them to neighboring AS’s.
There were many incidents for BGP hijacking, one of the most recent one happened November 2018
On November 12th, 2018, between 1:00 PM and 2:23 PM PST, some customers in the USA noticed issues connecting to Google G-Suite, Google Search as well as Google Analytics. The reason was that the traffic (destined to Google) was getting routed and dropped at China Telecom!
That was a severe denial of service to Google services. Some analysis indicated that the origin of this leak was the BGP peering relationship between a Nigerian provider, and China Telecom. The Nigerian provider has a peering relationship with Google via IXPN in Lagos and has direct routes to Google, which leaked into China Telecom. These leaked routes propagated from China Telecom, via some transit ISPs.
Numerous similar incidents taking place in 2017, were reported here: https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/01/14000-incidents-2017-routing-security-year-review/
In JACS, Blockchain is a vital component of the platform, it performs many functions, among which we can name (as related to the Internet routing security):
• Address allocation
• Address registry
• Route Origin verification and validation
• Security of allocation and advertisement, thus preventing any security breach in the Internet routing system, i.e. BGP Hijacking
