BGP Experiment

Tue Dec 18 15:05:26 UTC 2018

NANOG,

We would like to inform you of an experiment to evaluate alternatives
for speeding up adoption of BGP route origin validation (research
paper with details [A]).

Our plan is to announce prefix 184.164.224.0/24 with a valid
standards-compliant unassigned BGP attribute from routers operated by
the PEERING testbed [B, C]. The attribute will have flags 0xe0
(optional transitive [rfc4271, S4.3]), type 0xff (reserved for
development), and size 0x20 (256bits).

Our collaborators recently ran an equivalent experiment with no
complaints or known issues [A], and so we do not anticipate any
arising. Back in 2010, an experiment using unassigned attributes by
RIPE and Duke University caused disruption in Internet routing due to
a bug in Cisco routers [D, CVE-2010-3035]. Since then, this and other
similar bugs have been patched [e.g., CVE-2013-6051], and new BGP
attributes have been assigned (BGPsec-path) and adopted (large
communities). We have successfully tested propagation of the
announcements on Cisco IOS-based routers running versions 12.2(33)SRA
and 15.3(1)S, Quagga 0.99.23.1 and 1.1.1, as well as BIRD 1.4.5 and
1.6.3.

We plan to announce 184.164.224.0/24 from 8 PEERING locations for a
predefined period of 15 minutes starting 14:30 GMT, from Monday to
Thursday, between the 7th and 22nd of January, 2019 (full schedule and
locations [E]). We will stop the experiment immediately in case any
issues arise.

Although we do not expect the experiment to cause disruption, we
welcome feedback on its safety and especially on how to make it safer.
We can be reached at disco-experiment at googlegroups.com.

Amir Herzberg, University of Connecticut
Ethan Katz-Bassett, Columbia University
Haya Shulman, Fraunhofer SIT
Ítalo Cunha, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Michael Schapira, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Tomas Hlavacek, Fraunhofer SIT
Yossi Gilad, MIT

[A] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2018/program.html
[B] http://peering.usc.edu
[C] https://goo.gl/AFR1Cn
[D] https://labs.ripe.net/Members/erik/ripe-ncc-and-duke-university-bgp-experiment
[E] https://goo.gl/nJhmx1