The BGP Visibility Scanner

Andra Lutu andra.lutu at imdea.org
Wed May 15 10:22:10 UTC 2013


Dear all,

We have built a tool that checks the visibility of IPv4 prefixes at the 
interdomain level.
The tool is available at *http://visibility.it.uc3m.es/* and you can use 
it to retrieve the Limited Visibility Prefixes (LVPs) (i.e., prefixes 
that are not present in all the global routing tables we analyse) 
injected by a certain originating AS.
The query is very simple, it just requires to input the AS number for 
which you want to retrieve the originated LVPs, if any.
After checking the limited-visibility prefixes, we would appreciate any 
feedback that you can provide on the cause of the limited visibility (we 
provide a form with a few very short questions which you could fill in 
and submit).

Using a dataset from May 2nd 2013, we generated a list with the ASes 
which are originating LVPs: *http://visibility.it.uc3m.es/fullASlist.html*
We would like to hear from any operator who might find this project 
interesting, and, in particular, from these large contributors to the 
LVPs set.
Please note that advertising prefixes with limited visibility does not 
mean that the originating AS is necessarily doing something wrong.
The ASes might be generating the LVPs knowingly (e.g., scoped 
advertisements). However, there might be cases where the origin AS might 
be unaware that some prefixes are not globally visible (when they 
should) or that others are leaking as a consequence of 
mis-configurations/slips.

Our purpose is to spread awareness about these latter phenomena, help 
eliminate the cause of unintended/accidental LVPs and upgrade this tool 
to an anomaly detection mechanism.
For more information on the definition and characteristics of a Limited 
Visibility prefix, please check the Frequently Asked Questions section 
of the webpage, available here: 
*http://visibility.it.uc3m.es/Q_and_A_latest.html*

The tool works with publicly available BGP routing data, retrieved from 
the RIPE NCC RIS and RouteViews Projects. The results are updated on a 
daily basis.
For more information on the methodology we refer you to the slides of 
the NANOG57 presentation about the BGP Visibility Scanner:
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog57/presentations/Wednesday/wed.general.Lutu.BGP_visibility_scanner.19.pdf
Also, you can check the RIPE labs article about the BGP Visibility 
Scanner, available here: 
https://labs.ripe.net/Members/andra_lutu/the-bgp-visibility-scanner

We are looking forward to your feedback!

Thank you, best regards,
Andra



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