6. Security Considerations

6. Security Considerations

Although this specification discusses one portion of a system to validate BGP routes, it should be noted that it relies on a database (RPKI or other) to provide validation information. As such, the security properties of that database must be considered in order to determine the security provided by the overall solution. If "invalid" routes are blocked as this specification suggests, the overall system provides a possible denial-of-service vector; for example, if an attacker is able to inject (or remove) one or more records into (or from) the validation database, it could lead an otherwise valid route to be marked as invalid.

In addition, this system is only able to provide limited protection against a determined attacker -- the attacker need only prepend the "valid" source AS to a forged BGP route announcement in order to defeat the protection provided by this system.

This mechanism does not protect against "AS-in-the-middle attacks" or provide any path validation. It only attempts to verify the origin. In general, this system should be thought of more as a protection against misconfiguration than as true "security" in the strong sense.