One year of BGP (in)security

Its been 30 years since the famous meeting in a cafeteria where Kirk Lougheed and Yakov Rekhter used two napkins to sketch out the main feature of the BGP protoco …

It’s been 30 years since the famous meeting in a cafeteria where Kirk Lougheed and Yakov Rekhter used two napkins to sketch out the main feature of the BGP protocol. BGP was devised as an improved routing protocol able to fulfill the needs of an Internet that was about to take off. Yet as the architects themselves have admitted, security wasn’t even on the table back then. And despite several security-driven protocol enhancements and BCPs over the past 30 years, thousands of companies and millions of end users are still affected by route leaks and hijack attempts that cause service disruptions and loss of revenue.

In this talk, Catchpoint BGP expert Luca Sani will focus on route leaks and hijacks – he will explain what the biggest security risks are, how and why they came to be, and how they’ve affected end-user experiences around the world over the past year. Using one of the most famous leaks of 2019 as a case study, Luca will cover what went wrong and how it could have been prevented, hoping that such an analysis could raise awareness in the NANOG community on how important is to secure your network policies regardless of the size of your organization.

Luca Sani: Luca Sani received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Pisa, respectively in 2008 and 2010. In 2014 received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from IMT – School for Advanced Studies Lucca with a thesis focused on the analysis of the Internet inter-domain ecosystem. From 2014 to 2019 he has been a researcher at the Institute for Informatics and Telematics of the National Research Council of Italy where he mainly worked on the Isolario project, which he co-founded in 2013. He joined Catchpoint as a BGP expert in 2019.