It is a curious but true fact: the functionality that the Internet provides is only made possible thanks to a protocol that is entirely insecure: BGP. Previous research has shown how easy attacks on this protocol really are. While the BGP community has drafted several standards to improve the security of the protocol, these have proven to be very expensive to deploy.
The goal of this project is to bring transparency to Internet routing. The ownership of Internet routes (and Internet networks) is stored in so-called Regional Internet Registrars (RIR)—for Australia, for instance, this would be APNIC. In this project, we are going to develop code that regularly downloads data from the five existing RIR and imports it into a database for later analysis. We will develop algorithms that keep track of routing data and provide us with on-the-fly reports of changes. We evaluate and improve the performance of our solution and, if we find it useful, take additional data sources into account.