An Online Scheme for the Isolation of BGP Misconfiguration Errors

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) being the primary interdomain routing protocol, is the singular means of path establishment across the Internet. Therefore, misconfiguration errors in BGP routers result in failure to establish paths which in turn can cause several networks to become unreachable. In this paper, we first analyze data from recent BGP tables to show that misconfiguration errors occur very frequently in the Internet today. We then show theoretically and using real-world events the impact of these errors on routing stability. This impact is reflected in the BGP update messages and the routes exchanged during erroneous periods. Using these behavioral patterns, a scheme for real-time isolation of large-scale BGP misconfiguration events is then proposed in this paper. Our methodology is based on statistical techniques and is evaluated using data from past well- known misconfiguration events. We show the effectiveness of our method as compared to the current state-of-the-art. We also show how our approach can be used in conjunction with previously proposed techniques to pinpoint the root cause of the misconfiguration in an online manner.