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The Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) on Tuesday published a set of recommendations to enhance internet routing security. This work is aimed at a vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is an essential piece of infrastructure for determining how data flows across networks. With BGP route hijacking protection notifications, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your data exchanges remain secure in this growing era of cyber threats and general data breaches.
BGP is essential to the operation of the internet, serving as a critical function that allows more than 70,000 individual networks worldwide including key parts of our infrastructure and government agencies to communicate. Yet, BGP was not built with modern security in mind and this exposed internet traffic to threats such as route hijacking, route leaks etc. These are vulnerabilities that can lead to both data breaches and disruptions of the sort, which in turn places national security at risk.
ONCD´s roadmap focuses on RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure), a framework for improving internet routing security. Route updates between Routing Domains are validated and secured using RPKI, which helps to mitigate design issues such as route hijacking or mismanagement of IP address resources. Operators of key infrastructures as energy providers, cloud services or government organizations in particular should consider RPKI to be necessary.
With the Federal government taking it upon itself to ensure that BGP is secure, they have very vocally encouraged all network types (be them service providers or enterprises)to get on board with RPKI today. They aim to set up Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) as a best practice for government networks so that the way data is routed can be more justified. To support this work, a public-private sector working group with ONCD co-chairs is creating tools and guidelines for service providers to weigh threat risks against critical route origin security control priorities.
The US Government is partnering with industry leaders in a joint effort to protect internet routing integrity. To develop tactics for preventing future cyber security threats, ONCD is collaborating with organizations such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The goal here is to start treating internet routing security as a first-class citizen so that engineers know not only what the topic encompasses but also how they can use it to keep their networks safe and reliable.
With the rising of internet traffic and proliferation in the digital ecosystem, securing Internet Routing has emerged as a national security at risk. The ONCD’s roadmap offers a path to enhancing BGP security via RPKI deployment, while also blocking route leaks and IP address hijacks. All of this is expected to lead to a more trustworthy internet for all, as the initiative encourages government and industry cooperation.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), is the routing protocol used to route data between networks around the world so that they can operate as a single network composed of over 70,000 individual and independent networks.
RPKI is the system that secures and validates internet route updates from taking place in a sloppy manner such as Route Hijacking, etc.
Internet Routing Security ensures that data is transmitted safely between networks and defends against the cyber-attacks, protecting critical infrastructure from being compromised.
Federal government is taking the lead with efforts to harden internet routing by using RPKI and toughening up on security standards for federal networks.
Organizations can assist in securing routing by deploying RPKI, identifying risk-slippage security practices and giving their highest priority to protecting key features of route origination.
