BGPseclike

BGPseclike refers to security approaches for the Border Gateway Protocol that imitate or take inspiration from BGP security concepts, without necessarily delivering a formal, standardized protocol. It is not an official protocol name, but a descriptive label used in research and industry discussions to describe architectures that aim to protect BGP announcements through cryptographic methods and trust infrastructures similar to those used by BGPsec or S-BGP.

In practice, BGPseclike designs seek to provide origin authentication and path integrity for route advertisements. Components may include digital signatures on route objects, key management and revocation mechanisms, and a trust framework such as certificates or route-origin authorizations. The goal is to enable validators at participating routers or edge networks to detect and reject unauthorized or tampered routes, reducing the risk of prefix hijacks and misrouting.

Typical features associated with BGPseclike concepts include selective or partial signing of routing information, reliance on a public-key infrastructure, and incremental deployment strategies that do not require universal adoption to offer some level of protection. Such designs emphasize compatibility with existing BGP behavior while introducing mechanisms to verify provenance and integrity of route announcements.

Challenges for BGPseclike approaches include the computational and storage overhead of cryptographic operations, the complexity of key management across many operators, potential interoperability issues, and the need for coordinated deployment. As with formal BGP security standards, adoption depends on consensus, operational practicality, and the balance between security gains and deployment costs.

See also: BGPsec, S-BGP, RPKI, Route Origin Authorizations.