Is BGP safe yet?

by janandonly • 4 months ago

254 87 4 months ago

nemomarx• 4 months ago

This actually shows pretty good coverage for this feature, it seems to me. The big American isps do it, the mobile ones do too...

How many major isps would we want to implement it to be "safe" and what would that look like? Is this a regional thing? They've only listed 4 unsafe ones on the site and that doesn't seem like a major issue, but maybe they're very large somewhere.

KomoD• 4 months ago

We want more than just major isps.

They've listed way more than 4 (and those 4 are also massive), click "Show all".

There's 254 operators marked as unsafe.

chrismustcode• 4 months ago

I'm on sky in the UK which is marked as not safe due to no RPKI.

It's not on the list so imagine there is a fair few missing, would be neat to have a table you could filter by country, provider type (cloud/isp etc) based on real results from users.

edit: there's a show all button to expand the table

badgersnake• 4 months ago

I get the same result for A&A, but frankly I trust them more than some random site with (apparently) an axe to grind.

SCdF• 4 months ago

If you're interested, Community Fibre is a yes from this website

philipwhiuk• 4 months ago

Click show all.

Major ISPs like British Telecom (core UK telephony), NTT Docomo (Japan), Vodafone Espana (showing that Vodafone isn't doing it globally), Starlink (showing it's not a old tech problem), Rogers (US ISP) are listed unsafe.

I think the 31 is a misleadingly positive picture.

asveikau3• 4 months ago

I thought Rogers was Canadian.

asveikau3• 4 months ago

I got a fail on T-Mobile USA. It seems in the full list that T-Mobile is listed as both passing and failing.

RyJones• 4 months ago

T-Mobile consists of at least five distinct networks depending on when your carrier was purchased, last time I was talking with some of the network security guys in Factoria. It’s been four years - they may have converged some of them.

ck2• 4 months ago

same

     T-Mobile USA, AS21928 does NOT implement BGP safely

toast0• 4 months ago

How many major isps would we want to implement it to be "safe" and what would that look like?

It would be "enough" if all the major transit ISPs did it and it would be helpful if all the major residential ISPs did it. If non-RPKI routes can't propagate through transit ISPs, that makes it a much less useful thing to do.

RRRA• 4 months ago

Google being shown as unsafe makes me think they have some internal methods for filtering?

bilekas• 4 months ago

Google And digital ocean are huge players here but is there a reason they would only have partial coverage?

TIM is listed as insecure yet my test is successful.

Your ISP (Telecom Italia S.p.a., AS3269) implements BGP safely. It correctly drops invalid prefixes

commandersaki• 4 months ago

I think the test for BGP is Safe is when we stop using it and instead use SCION: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCION_(Internet_architecture).

wussboy• 4 months ago

Why hasn't this happened?

benjojo12• 4 months ago

Because SCION is mostly said as a joke in the more serious carrier world.

SCION is practically speaking proprietary, and has 1 and maybe a half implementations. I have a laundry list of real problems with SCION but SCION feels like one of those entities that would get quite legal-ey if discussed publicly.

dsr_2• 4 months ago

Because BGP works, is understood, and has been debugged by thousands of people and billions of sessions between dozens or hundreds of implementations.

So the benefit of changing out all that infrastucture needs to be much higher than the cost.

pigggg3• 4 months ago

SCION is generally considered snake oil within the network operator community. Its weird single vendor for profit company that ships it's software, the fact that no router hw asic fwding supports what they want to do and then the general scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto as well as some "green washing" for PR hype.

Sure the swiss have their toy but no one is taking it seriously.

xyquadrat2• 4 months ago

Hmm, I'd disagree. The fact that Anapaya Systems (the for profit company mentioned) has the only commercial implementation/adjacent software is a problem, yes. But "snake oil" doesn't quite match up with the fact that SCION right now provides the backbone for the Swiss financial network moving 200 billion CHF each day [1], so at least some level of workable technology has to be there. And for no one to be taking it seriously, there's a decently long list of multinational ISPs at the very least taking steps towards offering SCION to customers [2] (e.g. British Telecom has expressed enough interest that they have various recent marketing videos on Anapaya's YouTube channel). Finally, I'm not sure what you mean regarding the "scummy inclusion of block chain / crypto" - as someone who has worked on SCION-based projects I never heard anything about this. Apparently a blockchain company invested in Anapaya, but that doesn't really change anything about the protocol itself, does it?

[1] https://www.scion.org/ssfn-scion/ [2] https://www.scion.org/isps/

pocksuppet4• 4 months ago

When we abandon prefix routing based on I-told-you-so and start using Yggdrasil (https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/) we're safe.

olivier5199• 4 months ago

An ISP is marked as unsafe in the table, yet running the test says it is. (same ASN)

john_strinlai• 4 months ago

the last update on the table was feb 3. presumably rpki was implemented between then and now

arnorhs• 4 months ago

ISP's often have different infrastructure for different sets of customers (regional, mobile/landline differences etc) - often due to legacy M&As etc..

NewsaHackO• 4 months ago

A BGP hijack occurs when a malicious node deceives another node, lying about what the routes are for its neighbors. Without any security protocols, this misinformation can propagate from node to node, until a large number of nodes now know about, and attempt to use these incorrect, nonexistent, or malicious routes.

But with HTTPS, they wouldn't be able to actually pose as another website, just delay/black hole the request so it doesn't reach its goal target, right? From the figure, it makes it seem like a person can use BGP to spoof a website and make a user visit a phished website, but that's not right, correct?

dsr_2• 4 months ago

If you can inject arbitrary malicious routes, you can make ACME requests for a new cert.

ThomasGlanzmann• 4 months ago

You can mitigate this with DNSSEC, CAA records and account pinning. See: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident

infogulch2• 4 months ago

Well if they can deceive certificate authorities that implement the ACME protocol like LetsEncrypt, then they could get a certificate for your site with the HTTP-01 challenge, see the paper Using BGP to Acquire Bogus TLS Certificates (2017) [1]. That paper suggested a mitigation they call Multiple Vantage Point Verification, which has already been implemented [2].

[1] https://petsymposium.org/2017/papers/hotpets/bgp-bogus-tls.p...

[2] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/validating-challenges-fr...

tialaramex4• 4 months ago

They don't need ACME to do that, ACME is just an automation standard - the same rules apply for getting a certificate via ACME such as 3.2.2.4.19 "Agreed upon change to website - ACME" as for the manual process 3.2.2.4.18 "Agreed upon change to website v2". The ACME version is just designed for machines to automate easily (and as a result wildly more common in use today)

And Multi-perspective only helps against an attacker who is merely able to influence a local route, if they can ensure all your perspectives see the same thing the attacker wins.

jon-wood• 4 months ago

For anything major you're right, you'd expect them to be on the HSTS preload list in people's browsers which forces all requests over SSL which would then pick up an invalid certificate. That doesn't make this harmless though, just being able to blackhole traffic for something is a pretty significant attack - Pakistan a few years back accidentally caused YouTube to be unavailable ~worldwide when they only intended to make it unavailable within the country. There's also a lot of sites not on the preload list, and those you could fairly easily MITM, especially if you've also got access to a tame certificate issuer and I don't doubt that a nation state could persuade someone to issue them some certificates given the proper levers.

jeroenhd• 4 months ago

Only as long as all certificate authorities ensure that all networks they host servers on secure. If you can BGP spoof a domain-validating CA, you can get a valid certificate for any domain of your choice (unless maybe if that domain is DNSSEC-enabled, the CA does strict validation, and the domain has a CAA record for another CA that is not BGP-spoofable).

Major news outlets, government websites from various countries, the American army, and many more all lack CAA records, for instance. Any CA can generate a valid certificate for those domains and it's up to the people watching the public certificate transparency logs to catch any malicious certificates.

foobiekr• 4 months ago

BGP attacks have nothing to do with spoofed peers. They have to do with accepted peers behaving maliciously in terms of the AS Paths they advertise.

Once you control BGP you control any IP and can subvert certificate issuance that effectively uses IP to validate certificate issuance requests. For example anything that relies on a file or dns at a specific IP. Once you have done so, you ARE the site, no matter what HSTS says.

We’ve tried to solve this problem a few times with certificate pinning (dangerous) and more recently just giving up and using certificate transparency to try and mitigate the blast radius by hoping the duration can be curtailed. The whole system is incredibly fragile.

As an aside, BGP should move over to TLS (not https, http is a terrible protocol for this) for other reasons (it’s a better option than tcp aom/md5). That this is not already the case should inform people’s opinion of where this stuff is on the security timeline.

flipped• 3 months ago

certificate pinning (dangerous)

Dangerous how? Create a CAA record which pins your CA and only allow dns01 challenge. Problem solved, a BGP hijack can't issue a valid certificate for your site.

swisniewski• 4 months ago

You can use BGP hijacks to spoof another website.

You just need to get a publicly trusted CA to mint a certificate for your new site.

This can be done, for example, with let’s encrypt, using several of the various domain verification challenges they support.

There are some protections against this, such as CAA records in DNS, which restrict which CAs can issue certs and depending on the CA which verification methods are allowed. That may not provide adequate protection.

For example if you are using LE and are using verification mechanisms other than DNS then the attacker could trick LE to issuing it a cert.

That also depends on the security of DNS, which can be tricky.

So, yes, BGP hijacks can be used to impersonate other sites, even though they are using HTTPS.

When you configure your domains, Make sure you setup CAA, locked down to your specific CA, and have DNS sec setup, as a minimum bar. Also avoid using DV mechanisms that only rely on control over an IP address, as that can be subverted via BGP.

maltalex3• 4 months ago

RPKI doesn't make BGP safe, it makes it safer. BGP hijacks can still happen.

RPKI only secures the ownership information of a given prefix, not the path to that prefix. Under RPKI, an attacker can still claim to be on the path to a victim AS, and get the victim's traffic sent to it.

The solution to this was supposed to be BGPSec, but it's widely seen as un-deployable.

impl• 4 months ago

I believe the current attempt at mitigation for this is ASPA[0]. It still has a long way to go, but there are some big names behind it.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-sidrops-asp...

greyface-2• 4 months ago

It has a long way to go, in the same sense that ROA had a long way to go when Cloudflare first launched this site in 2020. ASPA records are fully supported by both RIPE and ARIN these days.

Retr0id• 4 months ago

and get the victim's traffic sent to it

This sounds "obviously bad" but the intricacies of routing aren't really my field, could you expand on why this is bad? (i.e. what specific bad things does it enable)

maltalex3• 4 months ago

Here are some examples:

The attacker can impersonate the victim, get a valid x509 certificate issued to it, and create a perfect replica of their website/api/whatever.

The attacker can perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the victim - record traffic, inject traffic, manipulate traffic, etc.

The attacker can just deny access to the victim - just drop packets meant for the victim.

rot2562• 4 months ago

I think that way to solve BGPs security problems might be to use a new cryptographic hammer, "Proof-Carraying Data", where messages come with cryptographic proofs that they were produced correctly. This allows you to basically just run BGP, but every AS proves that it ran it correctly. The proofs take constant time to verify, regardless of how large the network is, or how many hops the routing message has taken. Feasibility is helped by latency not being super critical in BGP and BGP being a pretty simple protocol; which makes computing these proofs plausible.

https://rot256.dev/post/bgp-pcd/

Proof-carrying data has come a long way in the last 10 years.

EDIT: you would still need RPKI, but not BGPSec

hugo1789• 4 months ago

I think RPKI is good enough. As we have TLS on top it doesn't need to be perfect.

maltalex3• 4 months ago

Only with certificate pinning or something similar. Otherwise, the attacker can get valid TLS certificates for any domain hosted on the hijacked IP addresses.

rot2562• 4 months ago

For LetsEncrypt, routing is authentication: if packets routed to the IP in the A record end up at your place, you can get a cert for that domain.

zymhan• 4 months ago

Those two things address orthogonal issues

altairprime• 4 months ago

“Safe” the platonic ideal is an impossibility. Any cryptographic solution depends ultimately on handshake agreements between fallible human executives and/or fallible human registries, and there’s no known alternative to that today. Is RPKI “safe”, relative to not RPKI? Yes, obviously, it is. Is it reasonable to interpret “safe” as ‘no further improvement is required’? Never: this is the Internet; one could expect the domain to be repurposed to cover more than RPKI someday. Yes, short-sighted leaders may use “RPKI is safe” as justification to withhold investment forward past it; but that outcome is certain regardless of how they justify it.

collabs• 4 months ago

Looks like Verizon does it correctly.

Your ISP (Verizon, AS701) implements BGP safely. It correctly drops invalid prefixes.

elashri• 4 months ago

Any reasons on why an ISP would not implement it other than effort/cost? Just for someone like me whose networks knowledge is very naive.

dec0dedab0de3• 4 months ago

They may be worried that their larger clients don't have things configured correctly, and they don't want to break things for them.

They may have older hardware that needs to be upgraded before they can use this feature.

They might even have their own way of filtering that they think is good enough.

Though, all of those really boil down to effort/cost.

_slih• 4 months ago

rpki adoption is the new ipv6 adoption. it looks great until you realize it only validates who owns the prefix, not the path to get there lol

betaby• 4 months ago

Path validation is handled by ASPA https://www.ripe.net/manage-ips-and-asns/resource-management...

greyface-2• 4 months ago

RPKI isn't just ROAs anymore, and BGP hijacks can happen at other places than just the first/last hop. Why hasn't this site been updated to test ASPA-invalid prefixes in addition to ROA-invalid ones?

lucasay• 4 months ago

RPKI makes BGP safer, not safe. It helps prevent some hijacks, but attackers can still mess with routing paths. Feels like we’re patching a trust-based system rather than fixing it.

volemo• 4 months ago

Wikimedia is an ISP?

dec0dedab0de3• 4 months ago

When they say ISP they mean anything with an ASN

NetOpWibby• 4 months ago

When was the last time this site was updated? It mentions Sprint, which hasn't existed for years.

dec0dedab0de3• 4 months ago

I think it just goes by ASN. Looks like Comcast owns the Sprint ASN now.

dorianmariecom• 4 months ago

i'm getting:

  Free SAS ISP signed unsafe

but when testing i'm getting a success

Your ISP (Free SAS, AS12322) implements BGP safely. It correctly drops invalid prefixes. Tweet this → Details fetch https://valid.rpki.isbgpsafeyet.com correctly accepted valid prefixes

fetch https://invalid.rpki.isbgpsafeyet.com correctly rejected invalid prefixes

Levitating• 4 months ago

Does not take BGPSec[1] into account, just RPKI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGPsec

surround2• 4 months ago

The graphic that shows that a hijacker can route traffic to their malicious website is a little misleading. Since the SSL certificate would be invalid, browsers would block the connection and show a warning.

I guess the attack could still be used for denial of service.

icedchai2• 4 months ago

Once you have control of the destination, you could get a valid SSL certificate with Letsencrypt or whatever.

surround2• 4 months ago

Wow I'm surprised, you're right, and it has happened before:

the attacker issued and registered a free temporary 3-month certificate for the developers[.]kakao.com domain through SSL certificate issuer called ZeroSSL. Because the routing policy was already manipulated by the BGP Hijacking, the attacker was able to register the certificate.

https://medium.com/s2wblog/post-mortem-of-klayswap-incident-...

ifwinterco• 4 months ago

Ironic this is from Cloudfare, probably the single entity most likely to be responsible for breaking the internet in 2026

pocksuppet4• 4 months ago

That's just how entrepreneurship is done these days. You aim to mislead the public in ways that benefit you, and somehow it actually works. If RPKI benefits you, you roll out a campaign that RPKI is great and necessary for internet safety. If you want to know all your users' real names, you roll out a campaign that age verification via identity document is needed to keep children safe on the internet. If your company sells separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, you roll out a campaign that the combined MMR vaccine makes children autistic. If your company sells weapons, you roll out a campaign to subsidize movies and video games that portray war as awesome and manly. If your company sells cigarettes but only men are buying them, you roll out a campaign that sells the freedom to smoke as a benefit of feminism. All of these things actually happened.

pocksuppet4• 4 months ago

RPKI and ASPA keeps you safer from other networks, but less safe from the registries. Consider what happens if your registry's country sanctions your country and you are unable to update any records held at the registry.

Is BGP safe yet?

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