SECURE AND POLICY-COMPLIANT SOURCE ROUTING

Secure and Policy-Compliant Source Routing

Abstract

                   In today’s Internet, inter-domain route control remains elusive; nevertheless, such control could improve the performance, reliability, and utility of the network for end users and ISPs alike.

                   While researchers have proposed a number of source routing techniques to combat this limitation, there has thus far been no way for independent ASes to ensure that such traffic does not circumvent local traffic policies, nor to accurately determine the correct party to charge for forwarding the traffic.

DESCRIPTION:

                   Platypus uses network capabilities, primitives that are placed within individual packets, to securely attest to the policy compliance of source routing requests.

                   Network capabilities are

                             i) Transferable: an entity can delegate capabilities to                                  others,

                             ii) Compostable: a packet may be accompanied by a set                                      of capabilities,

                              iii) Cryptographically authenticated. Capabilities can be                                         issued by to any parties they know how to bill. Each                                         capability specifies a desired transit point (called a                                        waypoint), a resource principal responsible for the                                           traffic, and a stamp of authorization.

Existing System

                   An increasing number of ASes have been connecting to the

Internet through the BGP inter-domain routing protocol. With increasing stress on the scale of this system and increasing reliance on Internet connectivity, more participants demand additional functionality from inter-domain routing that BGP cannot handle.

                    For example, we believe that the recent trend towards multi-homed stub networks exhibits a likely intent to achieve fault tolerant and load balanced connectivity to the Internet.

                    However, BGP today offers route fail-over times as long as 15 minutes and very limited control over incoming traffic across multiple wide area paths.

                    More research literature and news media are calling for stemming malicious or erroneous routing announcements. We propose policy control architecture, OPCA that runs as an overlay network on top of BGP.

                   OPCA allows an AS to make route change requests at other, remote ASes to achieve faster route fail-over and provide capabilities to control traffic entering the local AS.

Proposed System

                  

                   We present Platypus, an authenticated source routing system built around the concept of network capabilities, which allow for accountable, fine-grained path selection by cryptographically attesting to policy compliance at each hop along a source route.

                   Capabilities can be composed to construct routes through multiple ASes and can be delegated to third parties. Platypus caters to the needs of both end users and ISPs:

                   Users gain the ability to pool their resources and select routes other than the default, while ISPs maintain control over where, when, and whose packets traverse their networks.

                   We describe the design and implementation of an extensive Platypus policy framework that can be used to address several issues in wide-area routing at both the edge and the core, and evaluate its performance and security.

                    Our results show that incremental deployment of Platypus can achieve immediate gains.

Hardware Requirements

•         System                 : Pentium IV 2.4 GHz.

•         Hard Disk            : 40 GB.

•         Floppy Drive       : 1.44 Mb.

•         Monitor                : 15 VGA Colour.

•         Mouse                  : Logitech.

•         Ram                     : 256 Mb.

Software Requirements:

•         Operating system           : - Windows XP Professional.

•         Front End                       : - Visual Studio.Net 2005

•         Coding Language           : - Visual C# .Net.