Balanced Peer Lists: Towards a Collusion-Resistant BGP

In BGP, autonomous systems (ASes) advertise routes. Unfortunately, malicious ASes can advertise false routes that do not exist in the Internet. Many extensions of BGP have been proposed to allow each AS to check whether the received routes are false. It turns out that none of these extensions can defend against collusions among malicious ASes. In this paper, we present an extension of BGP that can defend against collusions. In our extension, each listed AS in an advertised route supplies a certified full list of all its peers, i.e. neighbors. Because full peer lists can be very large, we develop an optimization where each AS in an advertised route supplies a balanced peer list that is much smaller than its full peer list. Using real Internet topology data, we demonstrate that the average, or largest, balanced peer list is 92% smaller than the average, or largest respectively, full peer list.