At 1:13 PM +0200 4/14/11, Robert Raszuk wrote:
no.  it is telling the edge site, your paying customer, that they can
secure their prefix without upgrading hardware.

Can anyone in IDR or SIDR demystify for us here what securing BGP really requires (certificates, signatures, attestations you name it) if to secure a single prefix originated by customer site requires more then 4K of BGP message size ?

BGPSEC calls for each AS hop along a path to sign AS path info. Although the average path length is a bit less than 4 hops, there are some very long paths that appear in FIBs, e.g., over 20 hops. The desire to increase the max UPADTE size (from the current 4K limit) is intended to accommodate very long paths. The principle contributor to the size increase is the digital signature. If on users RSA, each signature would be at least 1K bytes, and might be 2K bytes, depending on the key length size chosen. So, a 20-hop path could yield a 20-40K set of sigs, independent of the other path security data.

The good news is that many long paths contain repeated AS#s, which could be collapsed into a single signature. But, that optimization has not yet been explored. Also, if we were to use DSA or ECDSA as a signature algorithm, instead of RSA, the signature size could drop to 128 or 256 bytes, from 1-2K, a savings of a factor of 4-8. Still, a 20-hop path, with no repeats, might not fit in a 4K UPDATE, with all of the other secruity data.

Hope that explanation helps.

Steve
_______________________________________________
sidr mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sidr

Reply via email to