2022 Volume 30 Pages 829-840
Border gateway protocol (BGP), which is known as a backbone protocol of the Internet, is constantly the target of many hijack attacks. To combat such attacks, many extensions of BGP have been developed to make BGP more secure. However, to perform experiments to evaluate their performance, most BGP extensions require the utilization of platforms, such as testbeds, with high operating costs. In this paper, we propose Scalable QUagga-based Automated Configuration on Bgp (SQUAB), a lightweight evaluation tool for protocols under development and for protocols that will be developed by a user with actual devices locally. SQUAB can configure BGP networks automatically, and thus it can significantly reduce the overhead of experiments on BGP and its extensions. Unlike conventional testbeds, SQUAB can set up BGP networks locally and its execution requires only a computational resource of a typical laptop computer. We used SQUAB in experiments to check the validity of functions based on network topologies in the real world. Our results show that SQUAB can configure a network composed of 50 routers within 52.9 seconds and consumes only 354.7MB of memory. Furthermore, as a SQUAB application, we evaluate route convergence in networks mixing BGP and BGPsec and then show that route selection differs due to BGPsec while the convergence time is stable.
