A LIGHTWEIGHT SECURE BORDER GATEWAY PROTOCOL FOR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS' NETWORKS

Abstract

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the foundation of inter-domain routing on the Internet; however, its lack of built-in security makes it vulnerable to routing attacks such as prefix hijacking and route manipulation. Although secure routing protocols such as Border Gateway Protocol Security (BGPsec) improve routing security through cryptographic validation, their high computational overhead, increased convergence time, and scalability limitations hinder their practical deployment within Internet Service Provider (ISP) environments. This study therefore proposed a Lightweight Secure Border Gateway Protocol (L-SBGP) that enhances routing security while reducing the computational complexity associated with existing secure BGP implementations. The study was guided by three objectives: to analyses the parameters influencing lightweight secure BGP protocols in reducing computational overhead, to develop a lightweight secure Border Gateway Protocol for ISP environments, and to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol. experimental research approach was adopted. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to identify the key factors influencing secure BGP performance, followed by an expert survey to validate the identified parameters. The findings from both approaches established CPU utilization, routing convergence time, and scalability as the principal parameters guiding the design of the proposed protocol. Based on these findings, L-SBGP was formally specified using a lightweight hash-based route validation mechanism, routing update classification, selective verification, mathematical modelling, protocol workflow, and routing algorithms. The proposed protocol was implemented using a Python-based simulation prototype executed in Google Colab and evaluated against conventional BGP and BGPsec. Performance evaluation was conducted using the average results obtained from twenty independent simulation runs under identical network conditions. The results demonstrated that L-SBGP achieved a routing convergence time of 0.0101 s compared with 0.1904 s for BGPsec, representing a 94.7% reduction in convergence delay. The protocol also reduced CPU utilization from 84.20% in BGPsec to 28.40%, corresponding to a 66.3% reduction in computational overhead. In addition, L-SBGP maintained equivalent routing scalability, routing correctness, memory utilization, and control-plane message overhead while achieving 100% suppression of simulated prefix hijacking attacks, comparable to BGPsec. The findings demonstrate that lightweight hash-based validation provides an effective alternative to computationally intensive cryptographic mechanisms for secure inter-domain routing. The study contributes a formally specified lightweight secure routing protocol and provides empirical evidence that routing security can be strengthened without significantly increasing computational requirements. The proposed L-SBGP offers a scalable, computationally efficient, and secure solution suitable for deployment within modern ISP environments and provides a foundation for future research on lightweight secure Internet routing.