SIXPACK: Securing Internet eXchange Points Against Curious onlooKers

Abstract

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) play an ever-growing role in Internet inter-connection. To facilitate the exchange of routes amongst their members, IXPs provide Route Server (RS) services to dispatch the routes according to each member’s peering policies. Nowadays, to make use of RSes, these policies must be disclosed to the IXP. This poses fundamental questions regarding the privacy guarantees of route-computation on confidential business information. Indeed, as evidenced by interaction with IXP administrators and a survey of network operators, this state of affairs raises privacy concerns among network administrators and even deters some networks from subscribing to RS services. We design SIXPACK, an RS service that leverages Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) to keep peering policies confidential, while extending, the functionalities of today’s RSes. As SMPC is notoriously heavy in terms of communication and computation, our design and implementation of SIXPACK aims at moving computation outside of the SMPC without compromising the privacy guarantees. par We assess the effectiveness and scalability of our system by evaluating a prototype implementation using traces of data from one of the largest IXPs in the world. Our evaluation results indicate that SIXPACK can scale to support privacy-preserving route-computation, even at IXPs with many hundreds of member networks.