Who uses RADB? [was BGP to doom us all]

Sat Mar 1 16:19:11 UTC 2003

> as you say for customers only. Inter-provider we have basic bogon checking plus 
> maximum prefix. Its too unwieldy to build when you have peers exchanging 
> thousands of routes... theres a belief that the peer should be behaving 
> responsibly tho and this is a condition of most bilateral peering contracts.

Unfortunately, contracts don't fix mis-(or malicious-) configurations on
compromised routers or from a peers disgruntled worker.

> Going back to the original topic on this thread I would expect a deliberate 
> attack on BGP routing to come from a customer not a provider such as Level3, if 
> they are filtering in turn to their customers we have a reasonable amount of 
> sanity checking going on

A large provider I worked for in the past had a router maliciously configured 
to inject a more-specific prefix for a very "popular network".  Even the "popular
networks" provider sent the traffic to us.  Had explicit prefix-based inter-
provider filtering been in place it would not have occurred, or at least "the
whole Internet" wouldn't have been affected. 

With the IRRs and inter-provider filtering it's the whole chicken and egg thing.  
Inter-provider filters aren't in place because no one cares about IRRs (even 
though they have other operational value as well).  Vendors don't support the 
amount of prefix filters required because they say no one uses them.  Heck,
lots of folks still don't ingress filter routes (or packets) from their
customers.

When ANS used to employ inter-provider filters the biggest problem was getting 
them updated and bouncing routes or sessions.  That's no excuse anymore 
because pretty much everyone supports the ability to incrementally update filters, 
and BGP Route Refresh fixes the bounce the session/route thing. 

So, let's recap why no one uses them (as many have said already in the related
thread):  Laziness.  The same laziness that results in the slew of other things 
many folks have pointed out not being addressed.

-danny