BGP Blockchain
draft-mcbride-rtgwg-bgp-blockchain-03
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| Authors | Mike McBride , Dirk Trossen , David Guzman , Thomas Martin | ||
| Last updated | 2024-02-06 | ||
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draft-mcbride-rtgwg-bgp-blockchain-03
Network Working Group M. McBride
Internet-Draft Futurewei
Intended status: Informational D. Trossen
Expires: 9 August 2024 D. Guzman
Huawei
T. Martin
MMU
6 February 2024
BGP Blockchain
draft-mcbride-rtgwg-bgp-blockchain-03
Abstract
A variety of mechanisms have been developed and deployed over the
years to secure BGP including the more recent RPKI/ROA mechanisms.
Is it also possible to use a distributed ledger such as Blockchain to
secure BGP? BGP provides decentralized connectivity across the
Internet. Blockchain provides decentralized secure transactions in a
append-only, tamper-resistant ledger. This document reviews possible
opportunities of using Blockchain to secure BGP policies within a
domain and across the global Internet. We propose that BGP data
could be placed in a blockchain and smart contracts can control how
the data is managed. This could create a single source of truth,
something for which blockchains are particularly well suited.
Status of This Memo
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provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 9 August 2024.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2024 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Requirements Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. A Strawman for a simple BGP Distributed Consensus System . . 3
3. Opportunities for Using DCSs for BGP . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Preventing fraudulent BGP origin announcements . . . . . 5
3.2. Validating incoming BGP updates . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Providing routing policy such as QoS . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.4. Protecting BGP files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.5. Providing path validation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.6. Securing BGP Controllers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.7. Securing Blockchain compromised by BGP vulnerabilities . 7
4. Key Challenges for a BGP DCS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. DCS Convergence Latency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2. Communication Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.3. Working on Inconsistent State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5. Possible Solution Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
5.1. Routing on Service Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5.2. Compute-Aware Traffic Steering . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
5.3. Locator/ID Separation Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
7. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
8. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
9. Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
10. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1. Introduction
There have been many proposed solutions to help secure the Border
Gateway Protocol (BGP) [RFC4271] including securing TCP, CoPP, IPSec,
Secure BGP, Route Origination Validation (ROV), BGPSec along with
many variations. Could we also use Distributed Consensus Systems
(DCS) such as Blockchain to secure BGP? This document provides a
review of how such DCSs could be used to secure BGP particularly as
supplements to existing solutions. Many of the proposals can be
extended to any routing protocol but the focus here is with BGP. The
potential attractiveness of adding DCS capabilities to BGP is that it
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adds additional security without changes to the BGP protocol.
Blockchain for BGP proposals are out of band to BGP, similar to RPKI,
and not suggesting new encodings. This analysis does not consider
external factors such as the energy demands of deploying such
solutions.
1.1. Requirements Language
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
2. A Strawman for a simple BGP Distributed Consensus System
Smart contracts are programs (state machines), executed within a DCS,
that run when predetermined conditions are met. These contracts are
executed automatically without an intermediary's involvement. Smart
contracts may be used in financial, real estate, etc environments to
automatically trigger predefined agreements between parties. A DCS
implements a smart contract in the form of a distributed state
machine, i.e., actions over a pool of information, where distributed
DCS nodes maintain the evolving state information over time,
utilizing proof techniques, such as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake,
and others, to ensure consensus over the latest valid information
pool (and thereby the latest state of the smart contract). In
popular Blockchain systems, this information pool is represented by
the longest blockchain that can be retrieved from the system by a
client, i.e., representing the current consensus among the DCS nodes
being queried by the client.
With this in mind, we can now describe a simple BGP DCS as one
consisting of N miners, which implement the distributed consensus for
a desired smart contract, utilizing a suitable proof technique for
the consensus. A DCS may implement more than one smart contract,
representing, e.g., different BGP capabilities as outlined later in
Section 3.
In addition, there are M clients inserting transactions into the
system. Those transactions relate to the desired smart contract or
may be retrievals of the latest valid consensus information.
Clients and miners may be different entities or they may the same,
whereby in the latter case M=N.
The figure below outlines a simple BGP DCS architecture, with BGPs
providing clients to the DCS system.
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+--------------------+
+------+ | +----------------+ | +------+
|BGP-A +------+-+ SMART CONTRACT +-+------+BGP-B |
|client| | +--------+-------+ | |client|
+------+ | | | +------+
| | |
| +--------+-------+ |
| | BGP BLOCKCHAIN | |
| | TABLE | |
| +----------------+ |
| DCS |
+--------------------+
Figure 1: BGP DCS Architecture
In our context of BGP, we can see actions over BGP information, such
as BGP origins, routing policies or others, as smart contracts over
which distributed consensus needs to be achieved; Section 3
elaborates on those examples. Through using such smart contracts
(over BGP information), a DCS for BGP would avoid BGP human
configuration errors or hijacks as common threats for BGP, instead
storing transaction information in the DCS where the consensus here
represents the latest valid BGP information.
In terms of trust assumptions, a DCS for BGP may require
authentication to prevent fraudulent DCS transactions, such as
fraudulent BGP announcements being made. For this, the existing RPKI
system could be used to authorize any client before sending suitable
smart contract transactions into the DCS. If not using RPKI, the DCS
would need to check a separate IRR prefix/AS database, if one were to
exist, in order to validate incoming transactions on the main DCS
before executing them; such separate IRR database could be realized
as a DCS itself. Furthermore, ROA entries could be added to the DCS
as secure transactions and those transactions would be relied upon by
route validators as authoritative. Perhaps DCS validation
information could be added as a new ROA field.
In terms of openness of the system, a permissioned system would
restrict both clients and miners to, e.g., AS owners, through
suitable verification steps upon joining the DCS. A permissionless
realisation, on the other hand, could more widely distribute the BGP
origin information, still relying on the detection of fraudulent
announcements through the above steps before executing a transaction.
A key requirement for realizing a suitable DCS for BGP is the latency
requirement for achieving consensus, i.e., retrieving the latest
valid information from the DCS. This requirement will need
reflection in choosing the appropriate proof technique for consensus.
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In the next section, we list several opportunities for using DCS in
BGP by expressing those opportunities in smart contract language,
i.e., allowing for being formulated as a distributed state machine
with a distributed information pool representing the latest valid
state of the system.
As we will show, having a blockchain as part of the bgp control plane
is probably not a good thing due it’s low transaction speed.
However, having blockchain integrated into BGP may be useful to show
proof of ownership of network assignments (addr, prefix, AS, etc).
BGP policy may be a good area of focus for blockchain including
address delegation contracts, billing, ARIN/RIPE databases, etc.
3. Opportunities for Using DCSs for BGP
There are various ways DCSs could be used in the context of BGP that
we will explore in this section, keeping in mind the questions of the
previous section.
3.1. Preventing fraudulent BGP origin announcements
BGP origin information is at the heart of BGP to ensure reachability
in the global Internet, while preventing any fraudulent announcement
of a BGP origin is an additional security aspect in providing this
global reachability.
Announcements (of BGP origins) here represent smart contracts in a
DCS, amending a distributed state (the BGP routing table), while
securing those transactions prevents fraudulently doing so.
For anomaly detection purposes, we could further secure BGP origin
information by comparing what's in a BGP blockchain table against
what's in the BGP table or the forwarding table. Additional reliance
upon BGP blockchain table could potentially help prevent high
frequency updates from causing routing disruptions.
3.2. Validating incoming BGP updates
This is very similar to the previous aspect whereas BGP origin may
not just be announced but updated, represented through a different
state machine to manipulate the distributed BGP information in the
DCS.
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And according to RIPE labs, BGP route updates tend to converge
globally in a few minutes. The propagation of newly announced
prefixes happens almost instantaneously, reaching 50% visibility in
under 10 seconds. Prefix withdrawals take longer to converge and
generate nearly 4 times more BGP traffic, with the visibility
dropping below 10% after approximately 2 minutes.
Although a DCS will likely not help with BGP updates, withdrawals may
be completed faster than in existing BGP systems.
Furthermore, networking innovations that link DCS operations, like
its ledger diffusion, more directly to emerging network capabilities,
as suggested in [IIC_whitepaper], may improve the DCS' transaction
completion latency and thereby provide a suitable alternative even
for update operations. This provides an opportunity for more
research and testing.
3.3. Providing routing policy such as QoS
In addition to the prefix to AS match information being stored in the
DCS, the routing policy of those routes could also be stored as part
of the DCS information. As long as the policy was correctly added to
the chain, the path policies cannot be altered except by those
authenticated to do so.
3.4. Protecting BGP files
The DCS information could also be used to store configuration files
within an AS in order to prevent malicious config tampering and to
prevent misconfiguration.
This protection could be provided within a private, i.e.,
permissioned, DCS where only authorized users have access to the DCS
data. This could also be used within a trusted external peering
environment to build a distributed database of BGP files such as
communities for use between BGP neighbors. Peers can use the DCS
data to understand the necessary peering relationship and act on the
communities in a consistent manner.
3.5. Providing path validation
BGP stores multiple paths to a destination in the BGP table. The BGP
table contains all of the routes from all of the neighbors. Only the
best route gets installed in the routing table. To help further
secure the BGP table, all of those routes/paths could be installed in
a DCS. Some mechanism could be used to validate these routes/paths,
that reside in the DCS, prior to one being selected as the path in
the routing table. This could also be extended to provide proof of
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transit across certain expected paths.
3.6. Securing BGP Controllers
BGP-LS is used to provide BGP topology information to a Controller.
That topology information could be added to a DCS to ensure that the
topology data is not compromised. PCEP, or other protocol, could be
used by a controller to validate any update of a BGP forwarding table
using this same (or separate) DCS. The latest forwarding rules would
be maintained in a DCS, which is built using BGP-LS data and
authorized users as an input. Without the proper credentials it
would be very difficult to update the forwarding rules in the DCS and
a record would be kept with all update attempts.
Furthermore, the DCS could be permissisoned, thereby restricting the
nodes holding as well as accessing information to trusted members of
the community.
3.7. Securing Blockchain compromised by BGP vulnerabilities
The attractiveness of DCS applications, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum,
are that they are highly decentralized and more resistant to attack.
This has opened the way for securing monetary transactions using
crytocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology.
Blockchains mining power, however, is centralized with mining pools
concentrating within certain regions and Autonomous Systems. This
also creates a more centralized routing situation which could become
vulnerable to BGP vulnerabilities where IP addresses of the mining
pools are hijacked. Therefore helping to further secure BGP will
help to secure blockchain's centralized mining pools, creating a
circular dependency where the use of blockchains in BGP will in turn
secure blockchains themselves.
4. Key Challenges for a BGP DCS
Let us now discuss the challenges arising from operating a DCS,
particularly when seen in the context of being utilized for BGP
opportunities, such as those outlined in the previous section. Here,
we can identify three key aspects, namely the latency for convergence
(Section 4.1), the associated communication costs for achieving
consensus (Section 4.2), and finally the working on inconsistent
state during an ongoing convergence process (Section 4.3). We
discuss each of those aspects in more detail in the following
respective subsections.
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4.1. DCS Convergence Latency
In order to understand the aspect of latency better, a bit of
background is needed on how a DCS generally working (the reader is
referred to more detailed material in references such as
[Nakamoto2008][Howard2014][Aspnes2022] for more details).
Key to achieving a distributed consensus (over some agreed
information, such as BGP route changes) is the distribution of the
information to the peers participating in the DCS. The majority
rule, formulated by von Newman [Newman1956], states for being able to
consent over the information, it needs distribution to at least N/2
peers with N being the size of the set of peers in the DCS; this
distribution is often referred to as diffusion in order to result in
a majority rule.
Given the overlay nature of DCSs, this diffusion is realized by peer-
side unicast replications, limited in number of peers to which each
peer diffuses the information. Systems, such as Ethereum, rely on
default configurations for the number of peers to diffuse to;
expected to be 50 at the time of writing this document. Each
receiving peer further distributes the information itself to another
set of peers.
Those sets of peers maintained at each peer are randomized through
mechanisms further detailed in, e.g., [Guzman2022]. The result is an
iterative diffusion process, creating an increasing number of peers
per iteration to which the information is distributed.
When visualizing this process, as done in Figure 2, we can see that
this process, bounded at the top by the desired majority of peers, is
bounded on the time axis by the convergence latency t_c, after which
the desired majority has been reached; it is important to note that
convergence, however, is not guaranteed and heavily dependent on the
random nature of each individual peer-initiated diffusion.
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n [peers] | +----+
| | |
| | |
| +---+ |
m=n/2 | | |
------+------------------+----+----------+--------+-----------
| | | | |
| +------+ | ... | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| +-------+ | | |
| | | | |
|---+ | | |
| | | |
--+-----------------------+----------+--------+-----------
t_c t [s]
Figure 2: Iterative process of diffusion, bounded by convergence
latency t_c to reach the majority of peers.
This latency t_c is crucial for the overall system to operate on
ensured, i.e., consistent state, and largely depends on three key
factors: (i) the number of peers in the DCS (ii), the number of
required iterations, and (iii) the latency for each iteration to
happen for a given configuration for the diffusion size. For (i),
the specific application of the DCS is largely a factor. With large
DCS systems, such as Ethereum, this number reaches beyond 500k peers.
If we assumed at least one peer per AS for many of our BGP examples,
the number of peers would also exceed 100k as per latest AS numbers
for the Internet. Item (iii) is a function of communication latency
and thus mainly depend on the nature of peer distribution and its
resulting network latency, while item (ii) is harder to bound since
it depends on the randomization of the individual peer-initiated
diffusions. Ideally, each peer shall distribute the information to
unique peers, not served by any other peer. Given the lack of
central coordination of the individual diffusions, however, peers may
well receive information multiple times from differing peers in
reality, thus not progressing the goal of reaching a majority rule
but prolonging t_c instead.
In systems, such as Ethereum, the diffusion and validation of
information can thus reach from about 1 minute to ca. 50 minutes in
90 percent of the cases [Pacheco2022] (Table 4). Translated onto our
BGP usages, this would lead to long periods of needing to work on
inconsistent state, an aspect being discussed in Section 4.3.
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The approach to increase the number of peers to which each peer
diffuses is one dependent on the costs for each individual peer
diffusion. Existing systems, such as Ethereum, limit the number to a
relative small number of 50 by default; we discuss next some of the
reasons for doing so.
The main takeaway is that the convergence latencies in large-scale
DCSs may cause significant issues with a number of BGP functions
where working on consistent state is crucial.
4.2. Communication Costs
While much has been reported on the computational costs for
blockchain and DCS technologies in general [Drusinsky2022], only
recently has the communication costs (and its underlying causes) been
studied [Guzman2022]. Key here is the randomization of the set of
peers (at each peer) to diffuse information to. For this, each peer
maintains a pool of peers as a combination of outgoing (i.e.,
actively sought connections) and incoming (i.e., passively received
connections from other peers) relationships. For each such relation,
a process of reachability checks, transport establishment, and
capability exchange is performed, all while a constant refreshing of
the (limited size) pool is ongoing, resulting in a constant
evacuation of peers from the pool.
As quantified in [Guzman2022], this has a significant impact on the
number of connection requests made by each peer as well as the costs
in terms of transferred but yet not used data during the relation
establishment. Further, the time to determine the desired number of
peers may take several minutes (on average 20 for the Ethereum
studies in [Guzman2022]), and thus defines the minimal time a peer
may need to wait until a single diffusion step can be finished; once
an initial pool has been built, refreshment will happen faster,
however, yet constant refreshing continues.
The insights provided in [Guzman2022] well explain the limits imposed
on diffusion steps, such as 50 in Ethereum systems, since the pool
maintenance process even for those fairly small sizes create already
significant costs per peer. Although the overall DCS platform costs
`merely' for the diffusion of information to create the desired
consensus and thus consistent state are subject to system-level
studies, initial work such as [Guzman2022] may provide the base data
as input. Extrapolating from this pure peer-centric available data
at this stage, however, lets us expect a very significant
communication cost for an Internet-scale DCS that could serve BGP.
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The main takeaway is that communication costs for a large-scale DCS
may be significant and thus may pose a challenge for building a
large-scale DCS at the right cost point for all AS providers to
participate.
4.3. Working on Inconsistent State
As outlined in Section 4.1, achieving consensus in a DCS, and thus
consistent state over which to operate the desired application,
experiences significant latencies, often in the range of many minutes
for large-scale systems. For this reason, various DCS platforms have
devised methods to work on inconsistent state, akin to operating on a
constantly amended ledger during an open accounting period in a
company.
Here, information that is in the process of diffusion is partially
operated over in so-called 'proof' operations to generate temporary
'truths', representing inconsistent yet agreed upon state until the
consistent state is available. In order to avoid collusion in
generating false truths, methods such as 'proof of work'
[Nakamoto2008] or 'proof of stake' [Dimitri2022], where the trust in
the truth is derived from the commitment to, e.g., spend significant
costs on computational operations over the incomplete state, which in
turn is responsible for much of the reported cost factor of popular
DCS systems, in particular for cryptocurrencies.
The main takeaway is that while this cost itself is something that
needs consideration for using for a system like BGP, it is to be
considered if the notion of working on inconsistent state is
acceptable for those largely independent AS operators that partake in
the overall BGP operation.
5. Possible Solution Technologies
Considering our challenges in the previous section in the context of
BGP, it seems desirable that any DCS for BGP operations shall
experience a minimal convergence latency, while keeping communication
but also computational costs at minimum, with the latter often
stemming from the proof methods arising from needing to operate on
inconsistent state durin the long convergence latency period.
In the following, we sketch some ideas at the level of network
technologies that may help addressing these challenges for making the
usage of a DCS for BGP more palatable, constrasting against current
methods of purely endpoint-centric techniques with its drawbacks well
observed in [Guzman2022].
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5.1. Routing on Service Addresses
When looking closer at the workings of a DCS, one can map the
interactions (i.e., inserting information, diffusing for consensus
and retrieving the consensus result) onto those of a service-based
systems. Here, peers can be seen as invoking those services at other
peers of the overall DCS. More formally, we can identify the
insertion service I, the diffusion service D and the query service Q
in a typical DCS. While I and Q are invoked only to a set of peers
with no responses given to I and responses gathered in Q (with the
largest returned information set representing the current consented
information), the diffusion service D is invokved recursively.
While specific DCS platforms use particular endpoint-initiated
methods realizing those interaction patterns, such as for discovering
other peers (and thus services) and diffusing any new information, as
investigated in [Guzman2022], one possible improvement to those
endpoint-centric methods is to utilize insights for network-supported
service routing instead.
The proposal in [I-D.trossen-rtgwg-rosa] postulates an approach to
route over service addresses, where those addresses (unlike routing
identifiers) are used to steer the traffic to the appropriate network
location, particularly for scenarios in which more than one network
location choice is possible (in the case of the DCS, peers executing
the services above). This idea well maps onto the working of a DCS,
when mapping the specific services onto the above introduced distinct
service addresses, while amending the anycast forwarding behaviour
outlined in [I-D.trossen-rtgwg-rosa] with a diffusion-based on.
With such approach, the endpoint-centric replications, together with
the frequent churn of relations as observed in [Guzman2022], would be
replaced with a service announcement based approach for discovery of
other peers. The resulting in-network diffusion retains the desired
random nature of the diffusion. Although we must still assume churn
for those peers of a DCS that may leave during the lifetime of the
DCS operations, buty the churn observed in [Guzman2022] is caused
through the replenishment of the diffusion pool, which is now
replaced with the in-network diffusion over a (ephemerally) stable
set of service, i.e., peer, announcements to the ROSA network.
Furthermore, the lower cost for in-network replication (due to the
missing churn for the discovery process) may allow for larger
diffusion sets being used, thus possibly reducing the overall
convergence latency - although a deeper analysis in those costs would
be required for a possible bounding of the diffusion size and thus
the possible minimal convergence latency in dependence of the overall
number of DCS peers.
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Deployment-wise, the ROSA approach also aligns with the overlay
approach used for a DCS today in that the 'ROSA domain'
[I-D.trossen-rtgwg-rosa] forms an overlay across possibly many
network domains, thus allows for separating the role of DCS provider
(which may operate the ROSA domain) from that of the network
operators used for bit transfer.
5.2. Compute-Aware Traffic Steering
Another network-level technology that may improve on the efficacy of
a DCS is that of 'compute-aware traffic steering'
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/cats/about/). This recently
approved effort in the IETF foresees the use of computational
information for steering traffic in various places of the network
(including, possibly, the application itself). Computational
information here may include capabilities of service resources, e.g.,
max connectivity speed or HW capabilities such as GPU availability,
but also dynamic information, e.g., on server CPU load, available
memory.
With this, currently deployed traffic steering decisions, mainly
relying on network information, could be supplemented with such
computational information and thus allow for sending traffic not to
the shortest (network) path but the, e.g., least loaded compute
resource instead.
In the context of a DCS, such computational awareness could
complement the aforementioned service routing capabilities in that
the peers chosen for diffusion (of information) may be further
constrained by computational capabilities (e.g., diffusing to least
loaded peers) as well as static capabilities (e.g., diffusing to
well-connected peers when retrieving relatively large, often TB,
blockchains). This overall may further improve latencies by choosing
`appropriate' resources instead of randomly chosen ones only. One
key route of investigation is the avoidance of collusion, here for
instance through announcing fake computational capabilities and
metrics for `attracting' more traffic in a DCS than a purely random
diffusion would result in.
5.3. Locator/ID Separation Protocol
TBD
6. Conclusions
This document discusses the use of distributed consensus system (DCS)
techniques to complement and further secure BGP overall.
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Although no specific recommendation on solutions is made, this
document aims at providing first insights to think more broadly on a
DCS-based infrastructure that may further enhance the capabilities of
BGP as a key protocol for the Internet. The authors are convinced
that a distributed ledger, such as blockchain, is not appropriate to
be used as part of the BGP control plane but can be useful to provide
additional security to BGP route information.
7. IANA Considerations
N/A
8. Security Considerations
Blockchains have inherent authentication through the use of public-
private keys. Any action that changes the state of the blockchain
ledger requires a signature, which authenticates the entity (only
someone with the private key could have created the signature). If
you need some method of relating a blockchain address to a real-world
entity, then that is something that would need to be added-on. But
any blockchain solution should take advantage of the inherent
authentication provided by the use of public keys.
If the smart contract is only checking membership in the authorised
set, then the users would have the capability to perform many actions
beyond what they should. Accidental errors (or compromised accounts)
could lead to harm. A secure blockchain system will place as much of
the logic controlling/restricting access in the code of the smart
contract itself as possible as this is the least corruptible part of
the system.
To apply this to BGP, it could be possible to use another thing that
blockchains do very well: namely assigning individual owners to
resources. NFTs gets a lot of deserved ridicule for the associated
hype and unethical behaviour, but the technology allows a verifiable
single source of ownership to be determined. This is something that
a PKI cannot do. It is possible to have multiple conflicting chains
of certificates signed (e.g., through error or attack). The natural
application of blockchains to BGP would be to consider prefixes as
tokens assigned to AS blockchain addresses. The unique owner of any
prefix could be determined with high confidence. This, plus the
signing of peering relationships by the relevant ASes, could solve a
lot of the problems with fraudulent announcements. If the smart
contract is written correctly (big if, obviously), then it would be
impossible for any entity to announce a route they were not
authorised to.
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There could be new blockchain related attacks that BGP would
experience if blockchain were to be added into BGP's policy system.
These attacks include trying to replace the trusted chain with a
fradulent chain. We will explore some of those here or in a new
draft.
9. Acknowledgement
10. Normative References
[Aspnes2022]
Aspnes, J., "Notes on Theory of Distributed Systems",
Book Yale University, 2022.
[Dimitri2022]
Dimitri, Nicola., "Proof-of-Stake in Algorand",
Journal ACM Distrib. Ledger Technol., 2022.
[Drusinsky2022]
Drusinsky, D., "On the High-Energy Consumption of Bitcoin
Mining", Journal IEEE Computer Society, 2022.
[Guzman2022]
Guzman, D., Trossen, D., McBride, M., and X. Fan,
"Insights on Impact of Distributed Ledgers on Provider
Networks", Paper Blockchain -- ICBC 2022, 2022.
[Howard2014]
Howard, H., "Distributed consensus revised",
Paper University of Cambridge UCAM-CL-TR-935, 2014.
[I-D.trossen-rtgwg-rosa]
Trossen, D., Contreras, L. M., Finkhäuser, J., and P.
Mendes, "Routing on Service Addresses", Work in Progress,
Internet-Draft, draft-trossen-rtgwg-rosa-02, 3 February
2023, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-
trossen-rtgwg-rosa-02>.
[IIC_whitepaper]
Trossen, D., Guzman, D., Kelkar, A., Fan, X., McBride, M.,
Zhang, L., and U. Graf, "Impact of Distributed Ledgers on
Provider Networks", Whitepaper Industry IoT Consortium
Whitepaper, 2022, <https://www.iiconsortium.org/
pdf/2022-01-10-Impact-of-Distributed-Ledgers-on-Provider-
Networks.pdf>.
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[Nakamoto2008]
Nakamoto, S., "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash
System", Paper Journal for General Philosophy of Science,
2008.
[Newman1956]
von Newman, J., "Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of
Reliable Organism from Unreliable Components",
Journal Automata Studies, 1956.
[Pacheco2022]
Pacheco, M., Oliva, G. A., Rajbahadur, G. K., and A. E.
Hassan, "Is My Transaction Done yet? An Empirical Study of
Transaction Processing Times in the Ethereum Blockchain
Platform", Journal ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol., 2022.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC4271] Rekhter, Y., Ed., Li, T., Ed., and S. Hares, Ed., "A
Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271,
DOI 10.17487/RFC4271, January 2006,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4271>.
Authors' Addresses
Mike McBride
Futurewei
Email: michael.mcbride@futurewei.com
Dirk Trossen
Huawei
Email: dirk.trossen@huawei.com
David Guzman
Huawei
Email: david.guzman@huawei.com
Thomas Martin
MMU
Email: t.martin@mmu.ac.uk
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