North American Network Operators Group
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Re: soBGP deployment

  • From: Russ White
  • Date: Mon May 23 22:22:34 2005 


You do need "trusted third party" to act as PKI root signer. We're lucky
because unlike other places, we do have hierarchy with ip addresses and
ASNs and NIR is the "root" organization.




Don't confuse cryptography with security.



You need one trusted third party to arrange for the cryptography to scale
(work). You need a different third party to help authenticate (secure)
the routing data.



IMHO, you don't necessarily want these two third parties to be the same.



One of, perhaps, the most confusing aspects of soBGP is that there are four
certificates. Why not just do one certificate? Because of this specific
separation....



1. We need someone to verify X's key is really X's key. We believe SP's
won't, necessarily, want to be in this business.



2. We need someone to verify X is allowed to advertise Y. We believe RR'
and SP's will probably be in this business, whether or not they like it.



3. We need some way for a local AS to express various things that don't
need to be signed by some third party, connectivity and policy,
specifically.



We want different chains of trust--one person to say "this is X's key,"
another to say: "this is X's address space."



:-)



Russ







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