Machiavellian routing: improving internet availability with BGP poisoning

We propose a new approach to mitigate disruptions of Internet connectivity. The Internet was designed to always find a route if there is a policy-compliant path; however, in many cases, connectivity is disrupted despite the existence of an underlying valid path. The research community has done considerable work on this problem, much of it focused on short-term outages that occur during route convergence. There has been less progress on addressing avoidable long-lasting outages. Our measurements show that long-lasting events contribute significantly to overall unavailability. To address these long-term problems, we develop a system, Machiavellian routing, for automatic failure remediation, centered around the use of BGP poisoning. With poisoning, an edge network can cause other networks to send traffic to it via paths that avoid a problem in a particular transit ISP. We describe the key challenges to using poisoning to improve Internet connectivity, and we develop a set of techniques to use it predictably, accurately, and effectively.