Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP)

This paper presents AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol), a network architecture that provides accountability as a first-order property. AIP uses a hierarchy of self-certifying addresses, in which each component is derived from the public key of the corresponding entity. The authors discuss how AIP enables simple solutions to source spoofing, denial-of-service, route hijacking, and route forgery. They also discuss how AIP's design meets the challenges of scaling, key management, and traffic engineering. The authors begin by belaboring, with a short list of examples, the trite but true observation that the Internet is rife with vulnerabilities at the IP layer. As amply demonstrated by recent events, even a single misconfigured router can wreak widespread havoc on packet delivery.