Preventing Route Leaks using a Decentralized Approach

In the inter-domain routing infrastructure, a route leak is defined as a violation of the routing policy agreed between two Autonomous Systems (AS). Specifically, one AS leaks a route from another AS. There are many examples where route leaks have resulted in large-scale outages on the Internet, taking down several services. Although route leaks seem a simple problem, the solution is complex because: (i) ASes consider -partiallyrouting policy private, (ii) lack of a formal and standard language to express routing policy and (iii) BGP lacks adequate cryptographic-based security. In this paper, we present a novel architecture that provides a solution to route leaks by addressing these three key issues. We define a formal language to express routing policy and we design a blockchain-based architecture to securely communicate it. Our decentralized architecture allows having private policies and interfaces with the current BGP infrastructure seamlessly.