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RPKI Beware: 53 Security Flaws Revealed in Alarming New Report

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The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is vulnerable to attacks, as the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) was introduced to secure BGP through Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), whose adoption has increased, with over 50% of announced prefixes now covered by ROAs and 25% of networks enforcing Routing Origin Validation (ROV).

RPKI mitigates BGP security vulnerabilities by adding cryptographic authentication to BGP announcements by providing a distributed repository system for storing and validating BGP information, enhancing the trust and security of routing protocols.

It provides security for BGP routing by verifying the origin and path of routes using ROAs, ASPAs, and BGPsec. RPs handle RPKI data validation and distribution to routers, while routers use the data to enforce security policies.

Overview RPKI

The conflicting requirements in RPKI RFCs can lead to inconsistent operational choices among networks, resulting in routing instabilities, rejected routes, and security vulnerabilities, which are particularly evident in validation rules, filtering logic, and route filtering criteria.

The vague and underspecified requirements in RPKI RFCs have led to inconsistent implementations, operational uncertainty, and potential security vulnerabilities. Discrepancies in certificate handling, ROA validation, error handling, and manifest management create risks such as prefix hijacks and operational disruptions.

RPKI software implementations are still vulnerable to intentional backdoors and security bugs due to a lack of test-tooling, the complexity of the cryptographic architecture, and the vagueness of RFC requirements. Despite continuous improvements, the persistence of vulnerabilities and problems in RPKI implementations remains a significant concern.

A deployment of RPKI faces challenges due to errors in ROAs and the use of test-mode ROV, hindering its widespread adoption. The community needs more experience and research into RPKI operations to ensure its maturity and secure deployment.

The lack of automation in RPKI deployment and management leads to operational challenges, including vulnerability risks and inconsistent validation results, which hinder the full global adoption of RPKI, and addressing these issues is crucial for a secure and efficient Internet.

The expanding adoption of RPKI has increased its vulnerability to attacks, where attackers can target RPKI components to disrupt validation, manipulate results, or gain unauthorized access, which can downgrade RPKI protection, allowing BGP attacks on supposedly RPKI protected systems.

As per the research, the Fort relying party validator was vulnerable to an RCE attack due to a buffer overflow in its key-usage extension processing, where an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to gain remote code execution on the victim’s system, potentially leading to network infiltration and data exfiltration.

The White House’s push for RPKI adoption is a significant step towards securing Internet routing, despite its current immaturity. While RPKI has limitations, its deployment is essential for improving the overall security of the Internet infrastructure.

RPKI, despite its current limitations, is a valuable tool for improving Internet routing security. Its ability to limit invalid BGP announcements and its potential for future developments make it a crucial component in enhancing the reliability and scalability of global networks.

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