Re:Widespread impact caused by Level 3 BGP route leak
by toast0 on Monday November 13, 2017 @12:17PM
(#15688034)
BGP is such a great foot gun precisely because the internet is decentralized.
There's no central repository of how to route traffic for an IP [1]. If there was, it would probably mess things up from time to time, but not to such a large extent.
Instead, we just have to kind of trust BGP announcements -- especially if they come from ISPs that credibly could route anything (Level 3, other "teir 1" isps).
[1] Actually there are some efforts to develop this. After all, IP allocations are essentially centralized under the five regional internet registries. There are some registries of routing information (RADB is the most well known, I think); but not all ASNs participate, and filtering routes from large transit ISPs is still a major problem.
There's no central repository of how to route traffic for an IP [1]. If there was, it would probably mess things up from time to time, but not to such a large extent.
Instead, we just have to kind of trust BGP announcements -- especially if they come from ISPs that credibly could route anything (Level 3, other "teir 1" isps).
[1] Actually there are some efforts to develop this. After all, IP allocations are essentially centralized under the five regional internet registries. There are some registries of routing information (RADB is the most well known, I think); but not all ASNs participate, and filtering routes from large transit ISPs is still a major problem.