Border Gateway Protocol: Origin Misconfigurations and Effects

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Introduction

The Internet is a highly unstable and non-reliable network which requires a strong routing protocol. There are about 493870 routes on the Internet and the number is increasing every day (CIDR Report). Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the exterior gateway routing protocol used for routing over the Internet worldwide. BGP exchanges routing information between autonomous systems over the Internet. An autonomous system (AS) can be defined as network or group of routers that implement the same routing policy (Halabi, 96). Routes are announced by the AS to its connecting AS and are thus advertised further.

Even though BGP is a stable protocol, various issues such as delayed convergence, instability, inbound and outbound policy changes continuously occur in the Internet (Mahajan, Wetherall, and Anderson 1). The issues can either occur due to misconfigurations, software bugs, and faulty hardware. Misconfiguration errors such as wrong prefix advertisement, wrong attributes, incorrect policy filters occur while advertising routes to the Internet. Such errors can lead to an outage of the Internet scaling from a short time span to even days.

In this paper, the causes of misconfigurations from the origin AS are discussed. The paper further explores the probable effects of such misconfigurations on the Internet routing table and connectivity, followed by a few real life incidents that caused the Internet to shut down. The paper concludes with discussing various methods that have been proposed earlier to prevent or at least localize the effects of such misconfigurations.

Overview of BGP

BGP is a special case of distance vector protocol called the path vector protocol used for routing between autonomous systems (Halabi,...

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