alt Hacker NewsRPKI doesn't make BGP safe, it makes it safer. BGP hijacks can still happen.
RPKI only secures the ownership information of a given prefix, not the path to that prefix. Under RPKI, an attacker can still claim to be on the path to a victim AS, and get the victim's traffic sent to it.
The solution to this was supposed to be BGPSec, but it's widely seen as un-deployable.
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“Safe” the platonic ideal is an impossibility. Any cryptographic solution depends ultimately on handshake agreements between fallible human executives and/or fallible human registries, and there’s no known alternative to that today. Is RPKI “safe”, relative to not RPKI? Yes, obviously, it is. Is it reasonable to interpret “safe” as ‘no further improvement is required’? Never: this is the Internet; one could expect the domain to be repurposed to cover more than RPKI someday. Yes, short-sighted leaders may use “RPKI is safe” as justification to withhold investment forward past it; but that outcome is certain regardless of how they justify it.
RPKI makes prefix ownership verifiable, but the path is still largely trust-based.
It feels like we’ve secured the part that’s easiest to validate, not necessarily the part that matters most.
I believe the current attempt at mitigation for this is ASPA[0]. It still has a long way to go, but there are some big names behind it.
[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sidrops-asp...
> and get the victim's traffic sent to it
This sounds "obviously bad" but the intricacies of routing aren't really my field, could you expand on why this is bad? (i.e. what specific bad things does it enable)
I think RPKI is good enough. As we have TLS on top it doesn't need to be perfect.
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I think that way to solve BGPs security problems might be to use a new cryptographic hammer, "Proof-Carraying Data", where messages come with cryptographic proofs that they were produced correctly. This allows you to basically just run BGP, but every AS proves that it ran it correctly. The proofs take constant time to verify, regardless of how large the network is, or how many hops the routing message has taken. Feasibility is helped by latency not being super critical in BGP and BGP being a pretty simple protocol; which makes computing these proofs plausible.
https://rot256.dev/post/bgp-pcd/
Proof-carrying data has come a long way in the last 10 years.
EDIT: you would still need RPKI, but not BGPSec