Active BGP Probing

For an Internet Service provider (ISP), the knowledge of which interdomain paths are traversed by its BGP announcements – and thus traffic flows – is essential to predict the impact of network faults, to perform effective traffic engineering, to develop peering strategies, and to assess the quality of connectivity provided by the ISP’s upstreams. We present methodologies to discover how the BGP announcements for an ISP’s prefix are propagated in the Internet, overcoming the limitations of passive observation of BGP routing tables by actively probing the network using specific BGP updates. The techniques do not require any changes to current operational practices or BGP implementations. We also show how our techniques may be used to determine the routing policies of other ISPs with respect to the ISP’s prefix. We validate our techniques through experimentation in the IPv6 Internet, discuss their possible application to IPv4, and compare their results to more traditional topology discovery techniques. We also discuss the operational impact of our techniques and possible ethical concerns arising from their use.

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