On the Risk of Misbehaving RPKI Authorities

Speaker:  Sharon Goldberg,  Boston University

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a new security infrastructure that relies on trusted authorities to prevent attacks on interdomain routing. The standard threat model for the RPKI supposes that authorities are trusted and routing is under attack. This talk discusses risks that arise when this threat model is flipped: when RPKI authorities are faulty, misconfigured, compromised, or compelled (e.g. by governments) to take certain actions. We also survey mechanisms that can increase transparency when RPKI authorities misbehave.

Joint work with Ethan Heilman, Danny Cooper, Kyle Brogle, and Leonid Reyzin.

Bio:

Sharon Goldberg is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Boston University. Her research uses tools from theory (cryptography, game-theory, algorithms), and networking (measurement, modeling, and simulation) to solve practical problems in network security. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2009, her B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 2003, has worked as a researcher at IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft, as an engineer at Bell Canada and Hydro One Networks, and has served on working groups of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In 2014 she received two IETF/IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, an NSF CAREER Award, and a Sloan Research Fellowship.