FEATURE BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, was not designed to be secure. It was designed to work – to route packets between the thousands of autonomous systems that make up the internet, quickly and at scale. For four decades, it has done exactly that. It has also, throughout those four decades, been exploited, misconfigured, and abused in ways that were predictable from the start. Route hijacks reroute traffic through hostile networks. Route leaks knock services offline. Nation-state cyber crews weaponize BGP to intercept communications at scale. These are not theoretical threats. They are documented, recurring events, and they remain possible today for one simple reason: BGP has no native way to verify that a network claiming to own a block of addresses actually does. A series of…