Research On OSPF Routing Protocol's Security

OSPF is a routing protocol developed by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), it's a Interior Gateway protocol based on the link state.OSPF gets the whole network's information by exchange the link state information with all other routers. It keeps a map which describes the network's topology, then use SPF algorithm to get the routing table. OSPF routers use five types of the packets to struct and maintain a link state database which is distributed structed on all routers in area. In these databases, routers save the same link state information. LSU (Link State Update Packet) is the most important packet in the OSPF's packets, because it takes the route information from one router to any other routers. But, when the LSU transmit on the network, it may be attacked by any faulty routers or intruders. These attacks to LSA, like MaxAge attack, Serial Number attack, and so on, can affect the network's stabilization and security.This article expatiate the OSPF routing protocol's principle, the characteristic and the significance of OSPF's security. Analyzed the principle of OSPF's network type, protocol packets and LSDB's structure, synchronize, update. Based on these, article analyzed OSPF routing protocol's security. For those holes, give several schemes to fix these problems. In the third chapter of this article, we present an efficient solution, OSPF routing protocol based on the LSU digital signature protection, to resolve the link state routing update authentication problem. At the last chater of this paper, it discusses the issue of the efficient and spending for the OSPF routing protocol.The security of OSPF routing protocol is one of the most important problems in the internet security, the research on the OSPF routing protocol's security will be the important issue on the network security. These results of this study can greatly enhance the network's security.