Motivated by the difficulty of effecting fundamental change in the architecture of the Internet, in this paper, we study from a theoretical perspective the question of how individuals can join forces toward collective ventures. To that end, we draw on an elementary concept in Internet systems engineering, namely, that of incremental deployability, which we study mathematically and computationally. For example, we show that incremental deployability is at least as general a concept as the Nash equilibrium (in that the latter can be derived from the former). We then draw on this foundation to design and analyze institutional mechanisms that are not only promising to bootstrap emerging Internet architectures but they also have broader applications in social organization beyond its predominant market (and finance)-based character.
For example, @cite_39 show that the deployment of Secure-BGP can be facilitated by a pair of mechanisms, namely, (i) routing policies that prefer Internet paths safeguarded by Secure-BGP in partial deployment and (ii) offloading cryptography from autonomous systems without a customer (known as stub autonomous systems) to their providers. These techniques improve the incremental deployability of Secure-BGP, however, the incentive structure these techniques induce remains akin to the stag hunt, and, in fact, Gill propose concentrating peer pressure and regulatory efforts to a small fraction of core autonomous systems for their techniques to be effective in driving the growth of Secure-BGP. Our point, therefore, that, although such line of effort is certainly helpful to the adoption of emerging technologies it is not in general conclusive, remains.
@cite_39
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The delivery of IP traffic through the Internet depends on the complex interactions between thousands of autonomous systems (AS) that exchange routing information using the border gateway protocol (BGP). This paper investigates the topological structure of the Internet in terms of customer-provider and peer-peer relationships between autonomous systems, as manifested in BGP routing policies. We describe a technique for inferring AS relationships by exploiting partial views of the AS graph available from different vantage points. Next we apply the technique to a collection of ten BGP routing tables to infer the relationships between neighboring autonomous systems. Based on these results, we analyze the hierarchical structure of the Internet and propose a five-level classification of AS. Our characterization differs from previous studies by focusing on the commercial relationships between autonomous systems rather than simply the connectivity between the nodes. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to distribute routing information between autonomous systems (ASes), is a critical component of the Internet's routing infrastructure. It is highly vulnerable to a variety of malicious attacks, due to the lack of a secure means of verifying the authenticity and legitimacy of BGP control traffic. This paper describes a secure, scalable, deployable architecture (S-BGP) for an authorization and authentication system that addresses most of the security problems associated with BGP. The paper discusses the vulnerabilities and security requirements associated with BGP, describes the S-BGP countermeasures, and explains how they address these vulnerabilities and requirements. In addition, this paper provides a comparison of this architecture to other approaches that have been proposed, analyzes the performance implications of the proposed countermeasures, and addresses operational issues. With a cryptographic root-of-trust for Internet routing(RPKI [17]) on the horizon, we can finally start planning the deployment of one of the secure interdomain routing protocols proposed over a decade ago (Secure BGP [22], secure origin BGP [37]). However, if experience with IPv6 is any indicator, this will be no easy task. Security concerns alone seem unlikely to provide sufficient local incentive to drive the deployment process forward. Worse yet, the security benefits provided by the S*BGP protocols do not even kick in until a large number of ASes have deployed them. Instead, we appeal to ISPs' interest in increasing revenue-generating traffic. We propose a strategy that governments and industry groups can use to harness ISPs' local business objectives and drive global S*BGP deployment. We evaluate our deployment strategy using theoretical analysis and large-scale simulations on empirical data. Our results give evidence that the market dynamics created by our proposal can transition the majority of the Internet to S*BGP. The Internet consists of rapidly increasing number of hosts interconnected by constantly evolving networks of links and routers. Interdomain routing in the Internet is coordinated by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The BGP allows each autonomous system (AS) to choose its own administrative policy in selecting routes and propagating reachability information to others. These routing policies are constrained by the contractual commercial agreements between administrative domains. For example, an AS sets its policy so that it does not provide transit services between its providers. Such policies imply that AS relationships are an important aspect of the Internet structure. We propose an augmented AS graph representation that classifies AS relationships into customer-provider, peering, and sibling relationships. We classify the types of routes that can appear in BGP routing tables based on the relationships between the ASs in the path and present heuristic algorithms that infer AS relationships from BGP routing tables. The algorithms are tested on publicly available BGP routing tables. We verify our inference results with AT&T internal information on its relationship with neighboring ASs. As much as 99.1 of our inference results are confirmed by the AT&T internal information. We also verify our inferred sibling relationships with the information acquired from the WHOIS lookup service. More than half of our inferred sibling-to-sibling relationships are confirmed by the WHOIS lookup service. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no publicly available information about AS relationships and this is the first attempt in understanding and inferring AS relationships in the Internet. We show evidence that some routing table entries stem from router misconfigurations.