Is BGP safe yet? No.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the postal service of the Internet. It’s responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route.
Unfortunately, it isn’t secure, and there have been some major Internet disruptions as a result. But fortunately there is a way to make it secure.
ISPs and other major Internet players (Sprint, Verizon, and others) would need to implement a certification system, called RPKI.
To better understand why BGP’s lack of security is so problematic, let’s look at a simplified model of how BGP is used to route Internet packets.
The Internet is not run by just one company. It’s made up of thousands of autonomous systems with nodes located all around the world, connected to each other in a massive graph.
In essence, the way BGP works is that each node must determine how to route packets using only what it knows from the nodes it connects with directly.
