Publication: Blockchain for management of internet resources
Loading...
Identifiers
Publication date
2021-10
Defense date
2022-02-14
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
3 January 2009, the first version of the Bitcoin software was released. That date has been
the really first time that blockchain technology has been revealed to the world. A blockchain is
an immutable distributed ledger that records validated transactions permanently employing
cryptography and a distributed consensus algorithms. All the information is stored and
validated by all the nodes composing the peer-to-peer network without the need of a trusted
third party. Bitcoin is the first application of this technology and it allows e-payments to
be easily performed between two parties with no need of intermediaries. Since then the
hype about the technology has led several advances, exceeding the pure financial sphere and
attempting to solve disparate problems, rather than digital payments only. As example,
Ethereum with its introduction of smart contracts, has been the first application of the
so called 2.0 generation of blockchain technology. A smart contract is a self-executing
program, stored in the blockchain, with the terms of the agreement between interested
parties hard-coded in the contract definition. Smart contract allow trusted transactions and
agreements to be performed between distrust parties without the need for any intermediary
or external enforcement mechanism. Therefore, with the introduction of smart contracts, the
blockchain paradigm can be extended to the automation of complex resource manipulation
and transference procedures in a transparent and trustable manner, by means of the
specification of these new types of contracts.
Blockchain and smart contracts technology is being adopted in a vast number of scenarios,
including finances, Internet of Things, health care, energy, education, and more. As with any
novel technology, there are many open questions about its usage and potential. For this
reason, we believe that practical experimentation is in order to have hands-on experiences.
So we present this research work on the application of the blockchain technology for the
management of internet resources.
The first study we present in this thesis is the design of a blockchain based application to
build a decentralised IP address registry. Empowering the blockchain technology we propose
to change by design the centralized structure of the current system to manage the global pool of IP addresses and the centralized and hierarchical model that is implemented in
the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) that makes lower layers in the hierarchy
susceptible to errors and abuses from entities placed in higher layers. Hence we present
the design of InBlock, a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) that provides decentralized
management of IP addresses. The InBlock automates the process of assigning
Internet resources to the user complying with the "law" written in its smart contracts.
InBlock also fulfills the same objectives as the current IP address allocation organizations,
i.e., uniqueness, fairness, conservation, aggregation, registration and minimized overhead.
InBlock is implemented as a set of blockchain’s smart contracts in Ethereum and it
implements all the functions needed for the management of a global pool of addresses
without any human intervention. Moreover InBlock embeds an alternative trust model to
the hierarchical one currently implemented by the RPKI.
In this thesis we present two Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation of InBlock: InBlock6
and InBlock4. InBlock6 implements the InBlock design and is centred on the management
of the IPv6 address space, that compared to the IPv4 address space, has way more free
resources that can be assigned. InBlock4 inherits its functionalities but for the IPv4 address
space and provides an alternative framework to register living resources (e.g. already assigned
resources) into the blockchain to enable the decentralised route origin validation. We present
the implementation and evaluation of both the PoC for the Ethereum blockchain and we
quantify their performance.
The second study we present in this thesis is on the design and a PoC implementation
of the Internet Routing Blockchain (IRB), an implementation of the Internet Routing
Registry (IRR) functionality within Hyperledger Fabric (HF). The IRR is a distributed
routing database that provides a mechanism for validating the contents of Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) announcement messages and mapping an origin Autonomous System (AS)
number to a list of networks [6]. The IRB relies on a permissioned blockchain technology that
is inherently distributed, allows to preserve the decentralised nature of the IRR, overcomes the
centralized governance model limitation of current used mechanism employing a consortium
based model, provides consistency and information stall-ness prevention and offers a simple
declaration syntax for the policy definition of ASes relationship.
As the final contribution of this thesis we present a study about route leaks prevention and
the utilization of the information stored in the IRR. A route leak is defined as the propagation
of a route beyond its intended scope. Those events have historically caused a consistent
number of incidents resulting in Internet disconnections and disservices that generates
money loss. In this research work we present the design and the performance evaluation
of Autonomous System Internet Registry Inference for path Authorization (ASIRIA), a mechanism for detecting leaked routes and leakage events that uses AS relationship
information inferred from the IRR.
Description
Keywords
Blockchain, Distributed autonomous organization, Internet Routing Blockchain, IP address allocation, InBlock