The Internet carries traffic between billions of devices every day and modern societies depend on the resiliency of the routing technology behind it to work around the frequent link outages caused by natural disasters, equipment failures, destruction of cables, and even wars. However, the routing technology behind all of this, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is fundamentally dependent on trust between all of the service providers running it. With tens of thousands of service providers on the Internet, malicious behavior and/or mistakes are daily occurrences that result in compromised connectivity to a subset of devices until manual operator intervention. The high frequency of these attacks and slow adoption of a secure replacement protocol dictates research into alternative solutions. In this dissertation, I focus on improving the security of the BGP protocol as it is deployed throughout the Internet today. This is motivated with several case studies of well-known BGP hijacking events and a broad literature review of research into the security of BGP. The defenses proposed in this dissertation are focused on incentive alignment so the organizations adopting them are the ones who benefit. The proposed defenses fall into the following two categories: improving the security of the data plane using control plane information, and using indicators from the control plane in conjunction with other data sources to detect abnormal routes. A key component developed for this research is a BGP route processing framework that provides a pluggable architecture to simplify the development of new strategies for marking bad BGP routes and for reacting to routes after they are classified. This framework is used to provide prototypes of the defenses and is included as part of this dissertation. Looking towards future protocols, I conclude with a security analysis of OpenFlow, a much newer control plane protocol to contrast its security gaps with those of BGP. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]