A novel routing verification approach based on blockchain for inter-domain routing in smart metropolitan area networks

Abstract In recent years, with the continuous expansion of metropolitan area networks, the routing security problem has become more and more serious. In particular, promise-violating attack to inter-domain routing protocol is one of the most difficult attacks to defend, which always leads to serious consequences, such as maliciously attracting traffic and disrupting the network. To deal with such attack, current research generally adopts routing verification. However, it can only detect attacks violating a specific routing policy triggered by one malicious node, and no research has yet solved the problem caused by multiple collusion nodes. In this paper, we propose BRVM, a blockchain-based routing verification model, to address the issue that violating the shortest AS Path policy. The main idea of BRVM is to construct a route proof chain to verify whether a route violates the policy with the help of the blockchain technology. The precondition that avoiding the collusion attack is that the proportion of the malicious verification nodes is lower than the fault tolerance rate of the consensus algorithm. Then, we prove the correctness of BRVM in theory, and implement a prototype based on Quagga and Hyperledger Fabric. Some experiments on this prototype show that BRVM can indeed solve the promise-violating problem caused by multiple collusion nodes, and about 15.5% faster in performance compared with SPIDeR.