Randy's Work Blog

Nils Rodday, Italo Cunha, Randy Bush, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Gabi Dreo Rodosek, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Revisiting RPKI Route Origin Validation on the Data Plane. TMA September 2021

The adoption of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is increasing, as are measurement activities to identify RPKI-based route origin validation (ROV). Several proposals try to identify Autonomous Systems (ASes) that deploy ROV using control plane as well as data plane measurements. We show why simple end-to-end measurements may lead to incorrect identification of ROV. In this paper we evaluate data plane traceroute measurements as a mechanism to extend coverage and provide a reproducible method for ROV identification using RIPE Atlas. Moreover, we extend the current state-of-the-art by identifying ROV performed by route servers at Internet Exchange Point (IXP) and using an include list to differentiate between fully and partially ROV-enforcing ASes. Our measurements from 5537 vantage points in 3694 ASes infer ROV is deployed in 206 unique ASes: 10 with strong confidence, 12 with weak confidence, and 184 indirectly adopting ROV via filtering by IXP route servers.

Clemens Mosig, Randy Bush, Cristel Pelsser, Thomas C. Schmidt, Matthias Wählisch; Revisiting Recommended BGP Route Flap Damping Configurations. TMA September 2021.

BGP Route Flap Damping (RFD) is recommended to suppress BGP churn. Current configuration recommendations for RFD, however, are based on a study from 2010. Since then, BGP churn increased by one order of magnitude, which may lead to outdated RFD parameters and introduce more loss of reachability of stable networks. In this paper, we revisit current recommendations to configure RFD. First, we develop an accurate and scalable emulation of Cisco and Juniper RFD implemen- tations and make it publicly available. Second, we successfully reproduce the 2010 measurement study that justified the current RFD recommendations using current data. Third, we consider the RFD implementation of an additional major router vendor (Juniper), which penalizes BGP churn differently compared to the previously studied Cisco implementation. Fourth, we include IPv6 data from 2020. Our results show that the recommended RFD configuration parameters from 2010, though seemingly rarely used, still hold today in IPv4 and IPv6 and across vendors, even though BGP churn increased significantly. Our study revises metrics to assess the impact of incorrectly configured RFD, discusses collateral damage, and gives insights into sweet spots when damping routes.