Locating internet routing instabilities

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for identifying the autonomous system (or systems) responsible when a routing change is observed and propagated by BGP. The origin of such a routing instability is deduced by examining and correlating BGP updates for many prefixes gathered at many observation points. Although interpreting BGP updates can be perplexing, we find that we can pinpoint the origin to either a single AS or a session between two ASes in most cases. We verify our methodology in two phases. First, we perform simulations on an AS topology derived from actual BGP updates using routing policies that are compatible with inferred peering/customer/provider relationships. In these simulations, in which network and router behavior are "ideal", we inject inter-AS link failures and demonstrate that our methodology can effectively identify most origins of instability. We then develop several heuristics to cope with the limitations of the actual BGP update propagation process and monitoring infrastructure, and apply our methodology and evaluation techniques to actual BGP updates gathered at hundreds of observation points. This approach of relying on data from BGP simulations as well as from measurements enables us to evaluate the inference quality achieved by our approach under ideal situations and how it is correlated with the actual quality and the number of observation points.

FSR: Formal Analysis and Implementation Toolkit for Safe Interdomain Routing

“…For instance, rcc is a tool for statically checking BGP configurations for possible faults. Other runtime debugging platforms include [5], [18]. Prior to deployment, one may also perform custom simulations, using platforms such as simBGP [34].…”

Locating Internet Instability under Simultaneous Events

“…l ↔ in figure 2 for example, the existing methods only consider the stable paths [5] ( ) 9,7,6,3, 2,1 and ( ) 9,7,6,5,4,1 , and they could not pinpoint the failed link ( )…”

Distributed time-aware provenance

“…Existing domain-specific solutions [4,18] typically work by recording some forensic data at each node, e.g., a list of past routing changes, which are then used to answer the administrator's questions on demand. However, tailoring the schema and the introspection mechanisms 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.…”