Secure Interdomain Traffic Exchange – BGP Robustness and DDoS Mitigation: NIST Releases Draft Special Publication 800-189

In recent years, numerous routing control plane anomalies such as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), prefix hijacking, and route leaks have resulted in Denial of Service (DoS), unwanted data traffic detours, and performance degradation. Large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on servers using spoofed Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and reflection-amplification in the data plane have resulted in significant disruption of services and resulting damages.

Draft NIST SP 800-189, Secure Interdomain Traffic Exchange: BGP Robustness and DDoS Mitigation, provides technical guidance and recommendations for technologies that improve the security and robustness of interdomain traffic exchange. Technologies recommended in this document for securing the interdomain routing control traffic include Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), BGP origin validation (BGP-OV), and prefix filtering. Additionally, technologies recommended for mitigating DoS and DDoS attacks include prevention of IP address spoofing using source address validation with Access Control Lists (ACLs) and unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF). Other technologies, such as Remotely Triggered Black Hole (RTBH) filtering, Flow Specification (Flowspec), and Response Rate Limiting (RRL), are also recommended as part of the overall security mechanisms.

This document is intended to guide information security officers and managers of federal enterprise networks. The guidance also applies to the network services of hosting providers (e.g., cloud-based applications and service hosting) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) when they are used to support federal IT systems. The guidance will also be useful for enterprise and transit network operators and equipment vendors in general.

A public comment period for this document is open until February 15, 2019.