Severe Vulnerabilities Discovered in Software to Protect Internet Routing

The ATHENE team consisting of Prof. Dr. Haya Schulmann and Niklas Vogel, both from Goethe University of Frankfurt, Donika Mirdita from TU Darmstadt, and Prof. Dr. Michael Waidner from TU Darmstadt and Fraunhofer SIT uncovered and disclosed 18 vulnerabilities. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD), operated by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), assigned five Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entries to these vulnerabilities, some critical with a score of 9.3 out of 10. The team used a testing tool, CURE, which they developed specifically for this project and which ATHENE makes available free of charge to all developers of RPKI software. The researchers found vulnerabilities in all popular implementations of the validator component of RPKI. They range between crashes, violation of standard behavior, and even severe bugs that allow a network adversary to completely take over an RPKI certificate hierarchy in order to inject its own trust anchor – effectively being able to forge authentic and valid yet bogus routing information (i.e., BGP announcements). It is unknown whether any of the vulnerabilities were already exploited by hackers in the wild.

RPKI is a relatively new standard. Today, about 50% of the Internet’s network prefixes are covered by RPKI certificates, and 37.8% of all Internet domains validate RPKI certificates. In particular, many large providers and operators support RPKI, e.g., Amazon Web Services, Cogent, Deutsche Telekom, Level 3, and Zayo.

The research work was carried out in the ATHENE research area Analytic Based Cybersecurity (ABC) (more information at https://abc.athene-center.de/en/ ) and appeared at the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium in San Diego, California, USA. The research paper can be downloaded from https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/the-cure-to-vulnerabilities-in-rpki-validation/. The testing tool CURE developed and used by the researchers to uncover the vulnerabilities can be downloaded from https://github.com/rp-cure/rp-cure.