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Understanding BGP misconfiguration

Authors:

David Wetherall,

Tom AndersonAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '02: Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

Pages 3 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/633025.633027

Published: 19 August 2002 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Understanding BGP misconfiguration

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '02: Proceedings of the 2002 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications

August 2002

368 pages

ISBN:158113570X

DOI:10.1145/633025

Conference Chairs:
Matt Mathis
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
,
Peter Steenkiste
Carnegie Mellon University
,
Program Chairs:
Hari Balakrishnan
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
,
Vern Paxson
ICIR

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 32, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2002 SIGCOMM conference
October 2002
332 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/964725
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2002 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 19 August 2002

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August 19 - 23, 2002

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SIGCOMM '02 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 300 submissions, 8%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 462 of 3,389 submissions, 14%

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Darwich OPelsser CVermeulen K(2025)Detecting Traffic Engineering from Public BGP DataPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-85960-1_13(307-334)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2025
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85960-1_13
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