UC Santa Cruz

The protocols currently in place for routing within autonomous systems (ASes) of the Internet (e.g., OSPFv2, IS-IS, EIGRP and RIPv2) lack confidentiality and are  vulnerable to many cyber attacks. Traditional approaches to adopting security measures in routing protocols rely on either manual configuration of too many symmetric keys or using key-distribution methods that require trust in third parties and digital certificates.  This paper describes a new approach to secure  routing within ASes that does not make any changes to existing or future routing protocols and completely eliminates the need to use  IPsec, digital certificates, manual configuration of link-authentication secrets or passwords, or auxiliary key distribution systems. Trusted routers in the same autonomous system are configured with the same two secret integers, and  any two neighbor routers use those secrets to become cryptographically entangled in the use of  encryption keys to  provide message confidentiality, integrity, and cryptographic authentication. Experimental results show that the new approach to attain secure routing independently of existing or future routing protocols  introduces minimum delays for the encryption and decryption of signaling messages among routers.