Issue with Noction IRP default setting (Was: BGP route hijack by AS10990)

Sat Aug 1 16:58:12 UTC 2020

On Sat, Aug 01, 2020 at 06:50:55AM -0700, Ca By wrote:
> I am not normally supporting a heavy hand in regulation, but i think it is
> fair to say Noction and similar BGP optimizers are unsafe at any speed and
> the FTC or similar should ban them in the USA. They harm consumers and are
> a risk to national security / critical infrastructure
> 
> Noction and similar could have set basic defaults (no-export, only create
> /25 bogus routes to limit scope), but they have been clear that their greed
> to suck up traffic does not benefit from these defaults and they wont do
> it.

Following a large scale BGP incident in March 2015, noction made it
possible to optionally set the well-known NO_EXPORT community on route
advertisements originated by IRP instances.

    "In order to further reduce the likelihood of these problems
    occurring in the future, we will be adding a feature within Noction
    IRP to give an option to tag all the more specific prefixes that it
    generates with the BGP NO_EXPORT community. This will not be enabled
    by default [snip]"
    https://www.noction.com/blog/route-optimizers
    Mar 27, 2015

Due to NO_EXPORT not being set in the default configuration, there are
probably if not certainly many unsuspecting network engineers who end up
deploying this software - without ever even considering - to change that
one setting in the configuration.

Fast forward a few years and a few incidents, on the topic of default
settings, following the Cloudflare/DQE/Verizon incident:

    "We do have no export community support and have done for many
    years. The use of more specifics is also optional. Neither replaces
    the need for filters."
    https://twitter.com/noction/status/1143177562191011840
    Jun 24, 2019

Community members responded:

    "Noction have been facilitating Internet outages for years and
    years and the best thing they can say in response is that it is
    technically possible to use their product responsibly, they just
    don't ship it that way."
    https://twitter.com/PowerDNS_Bert/status/1143252745257979905
    June 24, 2019

Last year Noction stated:

    "Nobody found this leak pleasant."
    https://www.noction.com/news/incident-response
    June 26, 2019

Sentiment we all can agree with, change is needed!

As far as I know, Noction IRP is the ONLY commercially available
off-the-shelf BGP route manipulation software which - as default - does
NOT set the BGP well-known NO_EXPORT community on the product's route
advertisements. This is a product design decision which causes
collateral damage.

I would like to urge Noction to reconsider their position. Seek to
migrate the existing users to use NO_EXPORT, and release a new version
of the IRP software which sets NO_EXPORT BY DEFAULT on all generated
routes.

Kind regards,

Job