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National cybersecurity chief Richard Clarke last week called for the addition of a "few million" dollars in annual federal funding for independent research aimed at improving the security and reliability of Internet protocols.
In a conference call, Clarke said he has talked with members of the Internet Engineering Task Force about the idea of creating a test bed that would simulate a large Internetlike system.
The test bed could be used to try out new protocols and routing designs for the Domain Name System (DNS) and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used in millions of core routers around the world.
"Systems like DNS and BGP could be the source of intentional or malicious acts, or the source of instability that could flop the Internet," Clarke said. "Frankly, we see a lot of BGP flopping all the time." That, he added, "creates minor pockets of instability in the Internet."
Clarke said BGP can become unstable when human errors in the protocol's routing tables, which are akin to massive phone books, are sent back and forth by routers. BGP is also vulnerable to attack because it doesn't use authentication or encryption, he said.
Packet Design LLC, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up, today plans to announce software designed to enhance the performance of BGP. The technology, called BGP Scalable Transport (BST), uses a "flooding" approach in which a message is sent to a neighboring router and then passed from that device to another router, and so on. The BST software is being marketed to router vendors, said Packet Design CEO Judy Estrin. The software is due for release next month. Pricing starts at $100,000.
John McConnell, an analyst at McConnell Associates in Boulder, Colo., described BST as "very promising technology." But, he added, "you need widespread adoption by the service providers for it to make a difference."
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