Skip to main content

Problem Definition and Classification of BGP Route Leaks
draft-ietf-grow-route-leak-problem-definition-06

The information below is for an old version of the document that is already published as an RFC.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 7908.
Authors Kotikalapudi Sriram , Doug Montgomery , Danny R. McPherson , Eric Osterweil , Brian Dickson
Last updated 2016-06-21 (Latest revision 2016-05-05)
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Intended RFC status Informational
Formats
Reviews
Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state Submitted to IESG for Publication
Document shepherd Chris Morrow
Shepherd write-up Show Last changed 2016-03-09
IESG IESG state Became RFC 7908 (Informational)
Action Holders
(None)
Consensus boilerplate Yes
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD Joel Jaeggli
Send notices to "Christopher Morrow" <christopher.morrow@gmail.com>
IANA IANA review state Version Changed - Review Needed
IANA action state No IANA Actions
draft-ietf-grow-route-leak-problem-definition-06
Global Routing Operations                                      K. Sriram
Internet-Draft                                             D. Montgomery
Intended status: Informational                                   US NIST
Expires: November 6, 2016                                   D. McPherson
                                                            E. Osterweil
                                                          Verisign, Inc.
                                                              B. Dickson
                                                             May 5, 2016

        Problem Definition and Classification of BGP Route Leaks
            draft-ietf-grow-route-leak-problem-definition-06

Abstract

   A systemic vulnerability of the Border Gateway Protocol routing
   system, known as 'route leaks', has received significant attention in
   recent years.  Frequent incidents that result in significant
   disruptions to Internet routing are labeled "route leaks", but to
   date a common definition of the term has been lacking.  This document
   provides a working definition of route leaks, keeping in mind the
   real occurrences that have received significant attention.  Further,
   this document attempts to enumerate (though not exhaustively)
   different types of route leaks based on observed events on the
   Internet.  The aim is to provide a taxonomy that covers several forms
   of route leaks that have been observed and are of concern to Internet
   user community as well as the network operator community.

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on November 6, 2016.

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 1]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Working Definition of Route Leaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Classification of Route Leaks Based on Documented Events  . .   3
     3.1.  Type 1: Hairpin Turn with Full Prefix . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.2.  Type 2: Lateral ISP-ISP-ISP Leak  . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.3.  Type 3: Leak of Transit-Provider Prefixes to Peer . . . .   5
     3.4.  Type 4: Leak of Peer Prefixes to Transit Provider . . . .   5
     3.5.  Type 5: Prefix Re-Origination with Data Path to
           Legitimate Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     3.6.  Type 6: Accidental Leak of Internal Prefixes and More
           Specific Prefixes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  Additional Comments about the Classification  . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   8.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10

1.  Introduction

   Frequent incidents [Huston2012][Cowie2013][Toonk2015-A][Toonk2015-B][
   Cowie2010][Madory][Zmijewski][Paseka][LRL][Khare] that result in
   significant disruptions to Internet routing are commonly called
   "route leaks".  Examination of the details of some of these incidents
   reveals that they vary in their form and technical details.  In order
   to pursue solutions to "the route leak problem" it is important to
   first provide a clear, technical definition of the problem and
   enumerate its most common forms.  Section 2 provides a working
   definition of route leaks, keeping in view many recent incidents that
   have received significant attention.  Section 3 attempts to enumerate
   (though not exhaustively) different types of route leaks based on

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 2]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

   observed events on the Internet.  Further, Section 3 provides a
   taxonomy that covers several forms of route leaks that have been
   observed and are of concern to Internet user community as well as the
   network operator community.  This document builds on and extends
   earlier work in the IETF [draft-dickson-sidr-route-leak-def][draft-di
   ckson-sidr-route-leak-reqts].

2.  Working Definition of Route Leaks

   A proposed working definition of route leak is as follows:

   A "route leak" is the propagation of routing announcement(s) beyond
   their intended scope.  That is, an AS's announcement of a learned BGP
   route to another AS is in violation of the intended policies of the
   receiver, the sender and/or one of the ASes along the preceding AS
   path.  The intended scope is usually defined by a set of local
   redistribution/filtering policies distributed among the ASes
   involved.  Often, these intended policies are defined in terms of the
   pair-wise peering business relationship between ASes (e.g., customer,
   transit provider, peer).  (For literature related to AS relationships
   and routing policies, see [Gao] [Luckie] [Gill].  For measurements of
   valley-free violations in Internet routing, see [Anwar] [Giotsas]
   [Wijchers].)

   The result of a route leak can be redirection of traffic through an
   unintended path which may enable eavesdropping or traffic analysis,
   and may or may not result in an overload or black-hole.  Route leaks
   can be accidental or malicious, but most often arise from accidental
   misconfigurations.

   The above definition is not intended to be all encompassing.  Our aim
   here is to have a working definition that fits enough observed
   incidents so that the IETF community has a basis for developing
   solutions for route leak detection and mitigation.

3.  Classification of Route Leaks Based on Documented Events

   As illustrated in Figure 1, a common form of route leak occurs when a
   multi-homed customer AS (such as AS3 in Figure 1) learns a prefix
   update from one transit provider (ISP1) and leaks the update to
   another transit provider (ISP2) in violation of intended routing
   policies, and further the second transit provider does not detect the
   leak and propagates the leaked update to its customers, peers, and
   transit ISPs.

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 3]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

                                      /\              /\
                                       \ route-leak(P)/
                                        \ propagated /
                                         \          /
              +------------+    peer    +------------+
        ______| ISP1 (AS1) |----------->|  ISP2 (AS2)|---------->
       /       ------------+  prefix(P) +------------+ route-leak(P)
      | prefix |          \   update      /\        \  propagated
       \  (P)  /           \              /          \
        -------   prefix(P) \            /            \
                     update  \          /              \
                              \        /route-leak(P)  \/
                              \/      /
                           +---------------+
                           | customer(AS3) |
                           +---------------+

        Figure 1: Illustration of the basic notion of a route leak.

   This document proposes the following taxonomy to cover several types
   of observed route leaks, while acknowledging that the list is not
   meant to be exhaustive.  In what follows, the AS that announces a
   route that is in violation of the intended policies is referred to as
   the "offending AS".

3.1.  Type 1: Hairpin Turn with Full Prefix

   Description: A multi-homed AS learns a route from one upstream ISP
   and simply propagates it to another upstream ISP (the turn
   essentially resembling a hairpin).  Neither the prefix nor the AS
   path in the update is altered.  This is similar to a straight forward
   path-poisoning attack [Kapela-Pilosov], but with full prefix.  It
   should be noted that leaks of this type are often accidental (i.e.
   not malicious).  The update basically makes a hairpin turn at the
   offending AS's multi-homed AS.  The leak often succeeds (i.e. leaked
   update is accepted and propagated) because the second ISP prefers
   customer announcement over peer announcement of the same prefix.
   Data packets would reach the legitimate destination albeit via the
   offending AS, unless they are dropped at the offending AS due to its
   inability to handle resulting large volumes of traffic.

   o  Example incidents: Examples of Type 1 route-leak incidents are (1)
      the Dodo-Telstra incident in March 2012 [Huston2012], (2) the
      VolumeDrive-Atrato incident in September 2014 [Madory], and (3)
      the massive Telekom Malaysia route leak of about 179,000 prefixes,
      which in turn Level3 accepted and propagated [Toonk2015-B].

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 4]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

3.2.  Type 2: Lateral ISP-ISP-ISP Leak

   Description: The term "lateral" here is synonymous with "non-transit"
   or "peer-to-peer".  This type of route leak typically occurs when,
   for example, three sequential ISP peers (e.g.  ISP-A, ISP-B, and ISP-
   C) are involved, and ISP-B receives a route from ISP-A and in turn
   leaks it to ISP-C.  The typical routing policy between laterally
   (i.e. non-transit) peering ISPs is that they should only propagate to
   each other their respective customer prefixes.

   o  Example incidents: In [Mauch-nanog][Mauch], route leaks of this
      type are reported by monitoring updates in the global BGP system
      and finding three or more very large ISP ASNs in a sequence in a
      BGP update's AS path.  [Mauch] observes that its detection
      algorithm detects for these anomalies and potentially route leaks
      because very large ISPs do not in general buy transit services
      from each other.  However, it also notes that there are exceptions
      when one very large ISP does indeed buy transit from another very
      large ISP, and accordingly exceptions are made in its detection
      algorithm for known cases.

3.3.  Type 3: Leak of Transit-Provider Prefixes to Peer

   Description: This type of route leak occurs when an offending AS
   leaks routes learned from its transit provider to a lateral (i.e.
   non-transit) peer.

   o  Example incidents: The incidents reported in [Mauch] include the
      Type 3 leaks.

3.4.  Type 4: Leak of Peer Prefixes to Transit Provider

   Description: This type of route leak occurs when an offending AS
   leaks routes learned from a lateral (i.e. non-transit) peer to its
   (the AS's) own transit provider.  These leaked routes typically
   originate from the customer cone of the lateral peer.

   o  Example incidents: Examples of Type 4 route-leak incidents are (1)
      the Axcelx-Hibernia route leak of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
      prefixes causing disruption of AWS and a variety of services that
      run on AWS [Kephart],(2) the Hathway-Airtel route leak of 336
      Google prefixes causing widespread interruption of Google services
      in Europe and Asia [Toonk2015-A], (3) the Moratel-PCCW route leak
      of Google prefixes causing Google's services to go offline
      [Paseka], and (4) Some of the example incidents cited for Type 1
      route leaks above are also inclusive of Type 4 route leaks.  For
      instance, in the Dodo-Telstra incident [Huston2012], the leaked

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 5]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

      routes from Dodo to Telstra included routes that Dodo learned from
      its transit providers as well as lateral peers.

3.5.  Type 5: Prefix Re-Origination with Data Path to Legitimate Origin

   Description: A multi-homed AS learns a route from one upstream ISP
   and announces the prefix to another upstream ISP as if it is being
   originated by it (i.e. strips the received AS path, and re-originates
   the prefix).  This can be called re-origination or mis-origination.
   However, somehow a reverse path to the legitimate origination AS may
   be present and data packets reach the legitimate destination albeit
   via the offending AS.  (Note: The presence of a reverse path here is
   not attributable to the use of path poisoning trick by the offending
   AS.)  But sometimes the reverse path may not be present, and data
   packets destined for the leaked prefix may be simply discarded at the
   offending AS.

   o  Example incidents: Examples of Type 5 route leak include (1) the
      China Telecom incident in April 2010 [Hiran][Cowie2010][Labovitz],
      (2) the Belarusian GlobalOneBel route leak incidents in February-
      March 2013 and May 2013 [Cowie2013], (3) the Icelandic Opin Kerfi-
      Simmin route leak incidents in July-August 2013 [Cowie2013], and
      (4) the Indosat route leak incident in April 2014 [Zmijewski].
      The reverse paths (i.e. data paths from the offending AS to the
      legitimate destinations) were present in incidents #1, #2 and #3
      cited above, but not in incident #4.  In incident #4, the
      misrouted data packets were dropped at Indosat's AS.

3.6.  Type 6: Accidental Leak of Internal Prefixes and More Specific
      Prefixes

   Description: An offending AS simply leaks its internal prefixes to
   one or more of its transit-provider ASes and/or ISP peers.  The
   leaked internal prefixes are often more specific prefixes subsumed by
   an already announced less specific prefix.  The more specific
   prefixes were not intended to be routed in eBGP.  Further, the AS
   receiving those leaks fails to filter them.  Typically, these leaked
   announcements are due to some transient failures within the AS; they
   are short-lived and typically withdrawn quickly following the
   announcements.  However, these more specific prefixes may momentarily
   cause the routes to be preferred over other aggregate (i.e. less
   specific) route announcements, thus redirecting traffic from its
   normal best path.

   o  Example incidents: Leaks of internal routes occur frequently (e.g.
      multiple times in a week), and the number of prefixes leaked range
      from hundreds to thousands per incident.  One highly conspicuous
      and widely disruptive leak of internal routes happened in August

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 6]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

      2014 when AS701 and AS705 leaked about 22,000 more specifics of
      already announced aggregates [Huston2014][Toonk2014].

4.  Additional Comments about the Classification

   It is worth noting that Types 1 through 4 are similar in that a route
   is leaked in violation of policy in each case, but what varies is the
   context of the leaked-route source AS and destination AS roles.

   Type 5 route leak (i.e. prefix mis-origination with data path to
   legitimate origin) can also happen in conjunction with the AS
   relationship contexts in Types 2, 3, and 4.  While these
   possibilities are acknowledged, simply enumerating more types to
   consider all such special cases does not add value as far as solution
   development for route leaks is concerned.  Hence, the special cases
   mentioned here are not included in enumerating route leak types.

5.  Security Considerations

   No security considerations apply since this is a problem definition
   document.

6.  IANA Considerations

   This document does not require an action from IANA.

7.  Acknowledgements

   The authors wish to thank Jared Mauch, Jeff Haas, Warren Kumari,
   Amogh Dhamdhere, Jakob Heitz, Geoff Huston, Randy Bush, Job Snijders,
   Ruediger Volk, Andrei Robachevsky, Charles van Niman, Chris Morrow,
   and Sandy Murphy for comments, suggestions, and critique.  The
   authors are also thankful to Padma Krishnaswamy, Oliver Borchert, and
   Okhee Kim for their comments and review.

8.  Informative References

   [Anwar]    Anwar, R., Niaz, H., Choffnes, D., Cunha, I., Gill, P.,
              and N. Katz-Bassett, "Investigating Interdomain Routing
              Policies in the Wild",  ACM Internet Measurement
              Conference (IMC), October 2015,
              <http://www.cs.usc.edu/assets/007/94928.pdf>.

   [Cowie2010]
              Cowie, J., "China's 18 Minute Mystery",  Dyn
              Research/Renesys Blog, November 2010,
              <http://research.dyn.com/2010/11/
              chinas-18-minute-mystery/>.

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 7]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

   [Cowie2013]
              Cowie, J., "The New Threat: Targeted Internet Traffic
              Misdirection",  Dyn Research/Renesys Blog, November 2013,
              <http://research.dyn.com/2013/11/
              mitm-internet-hijacking/>.

   [draft-dickson-sidr-route-leak-def]
              Dickson, B., "Route Leaks -- Definitions",  IETF Internet
              Draft (expired), October 2012,
              <https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dickson-sidr-route-
              leak-def-03>.

   [draft-dickson-sidr-route-leak-reqts]
              Dickson, B., "Route Leaks -- Requirements for Detection
              and Prevention thereof",  IETF Internet Draft (expired),
              March 2012, <http://tools.ietf.org/html/
              draft-dickson-sidr-route-leak-reqts-02>.

   [Gao]      Gao, L. and J. Rexford, "Stable Internet routing without
              global coordination",  IEEE/ACM Transactions on
              Networking, December 2001,
              <http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~jrex/papers/
              sigmetrics00.long.pdf>.

   [Gill]     Gill, P., Schapira, M., and S. Goldberg, "A Survey of
              Interdomain Routing Policies",  ACM SIGCOMM Computer
              Communication Review, January 2014,
              <http://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/papers/survey.pdf>.

   [Giotsas]  Giotsas, V. and S. Zhou, "Valley-free violation in
              Internet routing - Analysis based on BGP Community data",
               IEEE ICC 2012, June 2012.

   [Hiran]    Hiran, R., Carlsson, N., and P. Gill, "Characterizing
              Large-scale Routing Anomalies: A Case Study of the China
              Telecom Incident",  PAM 2013, March 2013,
              <http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~phillipa/papers/
              CTelecom.html>.

   [Huston2012]
              Huston, G., "Leaking Routes", March 2012,
              <http://labs.apnic.net/blabs/?p=139/>.

   [Huston2014]
              Huston, G., "What's so special about 512?", September
              2014, <http://labs.apnic.net/blabs/?p=520/>.

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 8]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

   [Kapela-Pilosov]
              Pilosov, A. and T. Kapela, "Stealing the Internet: An
              Internet-Scale Man in the Middle Attack", DEFCON-16 Las
              Vegas, NV, USA, August 2008,
              <https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-
              presentations/defcon-16-pilosov-kapela.pdf>.

   [Kephart]  Kephart, N., "Route Leak Causes Amazon and AWS Outage",
               ThousandEyes Blog, June 2015,
              <https://blog.thousandeyes.com/route-leak-causes-amazon-
              and-aws-outage>.

   [Khare]    Khare, V., Ju, Q., and B. Zhang, "Concurrent Prefix
              Hijacks: Occurrence and Impacts",  IMC 2012, Boston, MA,
              November 2012, <http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~bzhang/
              paper/12-imc-hijack.pdf>.

   [Labovitz]
              Labovitz, C., "Additional Discussion of the April China
              BGP Hijack Incident",  Arbor Networks IT Security Blog,
              November 2010,
              <http://www.arbornetworks.com/asert/2010/11/additional-
              discussion-of-the-april-china-bgp-hijack-incident/>.

   [LRL]      Khare, V., Ju, Q., and B. Zhang, "Large Route Leaks",
               Project web page, 2012,
              <http://nrl.cs.arizona.edu/projects/
              lsrl-events-from-2003-to-2009/>.

   [Luckie]   Luckie, M., Huffaker, B., Dhamdhere, A., Giotsas, V., and
              kc. claffy, "AS Relationships, Customer Cones, and
              Validation",  IMC 2013, October 2013,
              <http://www.caida.org/~amogh/papers/asrank-IMC13.pdf>.

   [Madory]   Madory, D., "Why Far-Flung Parts of the Internet Broke
              Today",  Dyn Research/Renesys Blog, September 2014,
              <http://research.dyn.com/2014/09/
              why-the-internet-broke-today/>.

   [Mauch]    Mauch, J., "BGP Routing Leak Detection System",  Project
              web page, 2014,
              <http://puck.nether.net/bgp/leakinfo.cgi/>.

   [Mauch-nanog]
              Mauch, J., "Detecting Routing Leaks by Counting",
              NANOG-41 Albuquerque, NM, USA, October 2007,
              <https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog41/presentations/
              mauch-lightning.pdf>.

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016                [Page 9]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

   [Paseka]   Paseka, T., "Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about
              How the Internet Works",  CloudFare Blog, November 2012,
              <http://blog.cloudflare.com/
              why-google-went-offline-today-and-a-bit-about/>.

   [Toonk2014]
              Toonk, A., "What caused today's Internet hiccup", August
              2014, <http://www.bgpmon.net/
              what-caused-todays-internet-hiccup/>.

   [Toonk2015-A]
              Toonk, A., "What caused the Google service interruption",
              March 2015, <http://www.bgpmon.net/
              what-caused-the-google-service-interruption/>.

   [Toonk2015-B]
              Toonk, A., "Massive route leak causes Internet slowdown",
              June 2015, <http://www.bgpmon.net/
              massive-route-leak-cause-internet-slowdown/>.

   [Wijchers]
              Wijchers, B. and B. Overeinder, "Quantitative Analysis of
              BGP Route Leaks",  RIPE-69, November 2014,
              <http://ripe69.ripe.net/
              presentations/157-RIPE-69-Routing-WG.pdf>.

   [Zmijewski]
              Zmijewski, E., "Indonesia Hijacks the World",  Dyn
              Research/Renesys Blog, April 2014,
              <http://research.dyn.com/2014/04/
              indonesia-hijacks-world/>.

Authors' Addresses

   Kotikalapudi Sriram
   US NIST

   Email: ksriram@nist.gov

   Doug Montgomery
   US NIST

   Email: dougm@nist.gov

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016               [Page 10]
Internet-Draft        Route Leak Problem Definition             May 2016

   Danny McPherson
   Verisign, Inc.

   Email: dmcpherson@verisign.com

   Eric Osterweil
   Verisign, Inc.

   Email: eosterweil@verisign.com

   Brian Dickson

   Email: brian.peter.dickson@gmail.com

Sriram, et al.          Expires November 6, 2016               [Page 11]