Understanding BGP misconfiguration

By Ratul Mahajan, David Wetherall, T. Anderson. Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication, 2002

654 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It is well-known that simple, accidental BGP configuration errors can disrupt Internet connectivity. Yet little is known about the frequency of misconfiguration or its causes, except for the few spectacular incidents of widespread outages. In this paper, we present the first quantitative study of BGP misconfiguration. Over a three week period, we analyzed routing table advertisements from 23 vantage points across the Internet backbone to detect incidents of misconfiguration. For each incident we polled the ISP operators involved to verify whether it was a misconfiguration, and to learn the cause of the incident. We also actively probed the Internet to determine the impact of misconfiguration on connectivity.Surprisingly, we find that configuration errors are pervasive, with 200-1200 prefixes (0.2-1.0% of the BGP table size) suffering from misconfiguration each day. Close to 3 in 4 of all new prefix advertisements were results of misconfiguration. Fortunately, the connectivity seen by end users is surprisingly robust to misconfigurations. While misconfigurations can substantially increase the update load on routers, only one in twenty five affects connectivity. While the causes of misconfiguration are diverse, we argue that most could be prevented through better router design.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Hardware and Architecture

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/044c48a26159f08d509ba64052f52d6ba29e097c

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of BGP Security Issues and Solutions (2010, methodology): “When incoming routes are received that do not adhere to these origins, they are flagged as suspicious for 24 hours, using the data from Mahajan et al. [ 95 ] that shows most misconfigurations and hijack attempts last for less than this amount of time.”
Security for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “Human-machine interaction is already a major reason for the network downtime [362], and security lapses due to human errors are no exception [363].”
FlowChecker: configuration analysis and verification of federated openflow infrastructures (2010, background): “Also, there was a considerable amount of work on detecting misconfiguration in routing ( [10], [12], [5], and [16]).”
AS relationships: inference and validation (2006, background): “Invalid paths caused by BGP misconfigurations occur quite often and affect 200-1200 BGP table entries each day [19].”
FIREMAN: a toolkit for firewall modeling and analysis (2006, background): “There are numerous studies on network topology, IP connectivity [5, 18, 28], and router configurations [10, 13, 14, 25].”
Debugging the data plane with anteater (2011, background): “As in any complex computer system, enterprise networks are prone to a wide range of errors [10, 11, 12, 14, 25, 32, 38, 41], such as misconfiguration, software bugs, or unexpected interactions across protocols.”
How to lease the internet in your spare time (2007, background): “First, although Cabo allows virtual networks to run customized protocols, we must demonstrate that the underlying equipment can provide this ﬂexibility at high enough speed.”
Detecting BGP configuration faults with static analysis (2005, methodology): “Router conguration. Mahajan et al. studied shortlived BGP misconguration by analyzing transient, globally visible BGP announcements from an edge network [ 24 ].”
Locating internet routing instabilities (2004, background): “Note that human misconfigurations of BGP [ 23 ] are either unintended changes impacting single prefixes, IGP costs, or whole BGP sessions.”
PHAS: A Prefix Hijack Alert System (2006, background): “[23] and [8] studied the exact prefix hijack as part of the MOAS (Multiple Origin AS) problem, in which one prefix has multiple origin ASes in the routing table.”
Understanding the network-level behavior of spammers (2006, background): “Although some short-lived routing announcements may be misconfigurations [15], the fact that these routing announcements continually appear, that they are for large address blocks, and that they typically coincide with spam arrivals (as shown in Figure 9) raised our suspicion about the veracity of t”
A clean slate 4D approach to network control and management (2005, background): “Analysis focusing specifically on BGP routing suggests that configuration errors are responsible for many network anomalies [41, 8].”
Improving the Reliability of Internet Paths with One-hop Source Routing (2004, background): “Conversely, it is known that BGP dynamics can result in a relatively long fail-over period [12] and that BGP misconfigurations are common [14].”
A General Approach to Network Configuration Analysis (2015, background): “Consequently, configuration errors that compromise availability, security, and performance are common [7] [21] [36].”
A study of prefix hijacking and interception in the internet (2007, background): “Overall, a majority of the ASes struggle to maintain up-to-date filters or any filters at all [27,47,49].”
Towards an accurate AS-level traceroute tool (2003, background): “This is a crucial part of diagnosing and fixing problems that stem from misconfiguration of the routing protocols [ 8 ] or serious equipment failures.”
Rushing attacks and defense in wireless ad hoc network routing protocols (2003, background): “In the current Internet, for example, misconfigured routing tables contribute to the majority of routing instabilities [26].”