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Eliding the (at this point frankly tiresome) arguments over cryptocurrency: Like most BGP security proposals, it suggests that you could validate that BGP anno

Eliding the (at this point frankly tiresome) arguments over cryptocurrency: Like most BGP security proposals, it suggests that you could validate that BGP announcements come from the owner of the prefix. Unlike most BGP security proposals, it lacks any specific mechanism to do so ('store it in a blockchain so ISPs can get the data' is insufficient - where is the description of the data format, the mining incentives, initial chain seeding, etc). Blockchain solves the problem of distributed consensus in the presence of unknown actors. However, no ISP is peering with an unknown actor, and distributed consensus between mutually trusting parties can be solved far more simply than a blockchain. BGP absolutely needs a mechanism to validate ownership of the prefix you are announcing. At its core, that means a list of prefixes and the public key of the owning institution, plus a signature field in the BGP packet. The interesting bit of any BGP enhancement is the governance of changes to the list of prefixes and keys.

brazzy 4y ago
>The interesting bit of any BGP enhancement is the governance of changes to the list of prefixes and keys. Doesn't that sound like a basically valid use case for a blockchain? Not saying that it's necessarily the best solution, but having that governance based on some kind of distributed consensus protocol does sound reasonable, and that's what a blockchain fundamentally provides.
- mort96 4y ago
  I don't know about you, but I would prefer it if the security of critical Internet infrastructure wasn't dependent on the popularity of some shitcoin. Which would be necessary, since the distributed consensus depends on the financial motivation for people to spend resources on mining new blocks. You'd need enough random people mining that a government couldn't do a 51% attack.
  - 0x64 4y ago
    What makes you think a network like this would be PoW in the first place? It could just be PoA.
    - mort96 4y ago
      If you do it by proof of authority, aren't you just back where you started with some hand-picked set of authorities which have to form a consensus, just like today's internet?
      - brazzy 4y ago
        The point would be that you'd have a secure and reliable method to reach, record, and distribute that consensus. Not much of a cryptopunk thing, but a possible useful application of the technology.
- danielheath 4y ago
  You could design one on blockchain, yes. I can't really discuss the particular merits of it, though, because this RFC doesn't deign to actually address any of the interesting or difficult parts of enhancing BGP. It doesn't even talk about what security properties their proposals would support if they had been written - other than 'more secure'.

brazzy 4y ago

>The interesting bit of any BGP enhancement is the governance of changes to the list of prefixes and keys. Doesn't that sound like a basically valid use case for a blockchain? Not saying that it's necessarily the best solution, but having that governance based on some kind of distributed consensus protocol does sound reasonable, and that's what a blockchain fundamentally provides.

mort96 4y ago
I don't know about you, but I would prefer it if the security of critical Internet infrastructure wasn't dependent on the popularity of some shitcoin. Which would be necessary, since the distributed consensus depends on the financial motivation for people to spend resources on mining new blocks. You'd need enough random people mining that a government couldn't do a 51% attack.
- 0x64 4y ago
  What makes you think a network like this would be PoW in the first place? It could just be PoA.
  - mort96 4y ago
    If you do it by proof of authority, aren't you just back where you started with some hand-picked set of authorities which have to form a consensus, just like today's internet?
    - brazzy 4y ago
      The point would be that you'd have a secure and reliable method to reach, record, and distribute that consensus. Not much of a cryptopunk thing, but a possible useful application of the technology.
danielheath 4y ago
You could design one on blockchain, yes. I can't really discuss the particular merits of it, though, because this RFC doesn't deign to actually address any of the interesting or difficult parts of enhancing BGP. It doesn't even talk about what security properties their proposals would support if they had been written - other than 'more secure'.