In April 1997, a small Virginia Internet service provider misconfigured its router, leading it to advertise that it was the best route to the entire Internet. The ensuing avalanche of data took down the router and disrupted major segments of the Internet, causing an outage that in some places lasted as long as two hours. Even the US government has focused on the weakness in the Internet's routers. Along with the domain name system (DNS), the Bush administration recently pointed to BGP as critical technology that needs to be secured. "The security and continued functioning of the Internet will be greatly influenced by the success or failure of implementing more secure and more robust BGP and DNS," the government stated in its latest National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace policy statement. "The nation has a vital interest in ensuring that this work proceeds." Despite the danger, the work is going slow
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the group that sets the technical standards for the Internet, has worked to formulate a specification for Secure BGP. However, network-hardware makers have been slow to sign off on the new technology because implementation would include a costly digital signature infrastructure and hardware upgrades. Dugan readily admits that the costs could be high, and that those costs would make the Internet more expensive to use. "It will raise up the cost of getting an address," he said. "But it's work that has to be done."
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