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IETF RFC 4264
BGP Wedgies
Last modified on Saturday, November 19th, 2005
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Network Working Group T. Griffin
Request for Comments: 4264 University of Cambridge
Category: Informational G. Huston
APNIC
November 2005
BGP Wedgies
 Status of this Memo
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does
not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this
memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright © The Internet Society (2005).
Abstract
It has commonly been assumed that the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
is a tool for distributing reachability information in a manner that
creates forwarding paths in a deterministic manner. In this memo we
will describe a class of BGP configurations for which there is more
than one potential outcome, and where forwarding states other than
the intended state are equally stable. Also, the stable state where
BGP converges may be selected by BGP in a non-deterministic manner.
These stable, but unintended, BGP states are termed here "BGP
Wedgies".
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Describing BGP Routing Policy ...................................2
3. BGP Wedgies .....................................................3
4. Multi-Party BGP Wedgies .........................................6
5. BGP and Determinism .............................................7
6. Security Considerations .........................................8
7. References ......................................................9
7.1. Normative References .......................................9
7.2. Informative References .....................................9
Griffin & Huston Informational PAGE 1 
RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
1. Introduction
It has commonly been assumed that the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
[RFC 1771] is a tool for distributing reachability information in a
manner that creates forwarding paths in a deterministic manner. This
is a 'problem statement' memo that describes a class of BGP
configurations for which there is more than one stable forwarding
state. In this class of configurations there exist multiple stable
forwarding states. One of these stable forwarding states is the
intended state, with other stable forwarding states being unintended.
The BGP convergence process of selection of a stable forwarding state
may operate in a non-deterministic manner in such cases.
These stable, but unintended, BGP states are termed here "BGP
Wedgies".
2. Describing BGP Routing Policy
BGP routing policies generally reflect each network administrator's
objective to optimize their position with respect to their network's
cost, performance, and reliability.
With respect to cost optimization, the local network's default
routing policy often reflects a local preference to prefer routes
learned from a customer to routes learned from some form of peering
exchange. In the same vein, the local network is often configured to
prefer routes learned from a peer or a customer over those learned
from a directly connected upstream transit provider. These
preferences may be expressed via a local preference configuration
setting, where the local preference overrides the AS path length
metric of the base BGP operation.
In terms of engineering reliability in the inter-domain routing
environment it is commonly the case that a service provider may enter
into arrangements with two or more upstream transit providers,
passing routes to all upstream providers, and receiving traffic from
all sources. If the path to one upstream fails, the traffic will
switch to other links. Once the path is recovered, the traffic
should switch back.
In such situations of multiple upstream providers it is also common
to place a relative preference on the providers, so that one
connection is regarded as a preferred, or "primary" connection, and
other connections are regarded as less preferred, or "backup"
connections. The intent is typically that the backup connections
will be used for traffic only for the duration of a failure in the
primary connection.
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
It is possible to express this primary / backup policy using local AS
path prepending, where the AS path is artificially lengthened towards
the backup providers, using additional instances of the local AS.
This is not a deterministic selection algorithm, as the selected
primary provider may in turn be using AS path prepending to its
backup upstream provider, and in certain cases the path through the
backup provider may still be selected as the shortest AS path length.
An alternative approach to routing policy specification uses BGP
communities [RFC 1997]. In this case, the provider publishes a set of
community values that allows the client to select the provider's
local preference setting. The client can use a community to mark a
route as "backup only" towards the backup provider, and "primary
preferred' to the primary provider, assuming both providers support
community values with such semantics. In this case, the local
preference overrides the AS path length metric, so that if the route
is marked "backup only", the route will be selected only when there
is no other source of the route.
3. BGP Wedgies
The richness of local policy expression through the use of
communities, when coupled with the behavior of a distance vector
protocol like BGP, leads to the observation that certain
configurations have more than one "solution", or more than one stable
BGP state. An example of such a situation is indicated in Figure 1.
+----+peer peer+----+
|AS 3|------------------------|AS 4|
+----+ +----+
|provider provider|
| |
| |
|customer |
+----+ |
|AS 2| |
+----+ |
|provider |
| |
| |
|customer customer|
+---------------+ +----------+
backup service| |primary service
+----+
|AS 1|
+----+
Figure 1
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
In this case, AS1 has marked its advertisement of prefixes to AS2 as
"backup only", and its advertisement of prefixes to AS4 as "primary".
AS4 will advertise AS1's prefixes to AS3. AS3 will hear AS4's
advertisement across the peering link, and select AS1's prefixes with
the path "AS4, AS1". AS3 will advertise these prefixes to AS2. AS2
will hear two paths to AS1's prefixes, the first is via the direct
connection to AS1, and the second is via the path "AS3, AS4, AS1".
AS2 will prefer the longer path, as the directly connected routes are
marked "backup only", and AS2's local preference decision will prefer
the AS3 advertisement over the AS1 advertisement.
This is the intended outcome of AS1's policy settings where, in the
'normal' state, no traffic passes from AS2 to AS1 across the backup
link, and AS2 reaches AS1 via a path that transits AS3 and AS4, using
the primary link to AS1.
This intended outcome is achieved as long as AS1 announces its routes
on the primary path to AS4 before announcing its backup routes to
AS2.
If the AS1 - AS4 path is broken, causing a BGP session failure
between AS1 and AS4, then AS4 will withdraw its advertisement of
AS1's routes to AS3, who, in turn, will send a withdrawal to AS2.
AS2 will then select the backup path to AS1. AS2 will advertise this
path to AS3, and AS3 will advertise this path to AS4. Again, this is
part of the intended operation of the primary / backup policy
setting, and all traffic to AS1 will use the backup path.
When connectivity between AS4 and AS1 is restored the BGP state will
not revert to the original state. AS4 will learn the primary path to
AS1 and re-advertise this to AS3 using the path "AS4, AS1". AS3,
using a default preference of preferring customer-advertised routes
over peer routes will continue to prefer the "AS2, AS1" path. AS3
will not pass any updates to AS2. After the restoration of the
AS4-to-AS1 circuit, the traffic from AS3 to AS1 and from AS2 to AS1
will be presented to AS1 via the backup path, even through the
primary path via AS4 is back in service.
The intended forwarding state can only be restored by AS1
deliberately bringing down its eBGP session with AS2, even though it
is carrying traffic. This will cause the BGP state to revert to the
intended configuration.
It is often the case that an AS will attempt to balance incoming
traffic across multiple providers, again using the primary / backup
mechanism. For some prefixes one link is configured as the primary
link, and the others as the backup link, while for other prefixes
another link is selected as the primary link. An example is shown in
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
Figure 2.
+----+peer peer+----+
|AS 3|--------------------------|AS 4|
+----+ +----+
|provider provider|
| |
| customer|
|customer |
+----+ +----+
|AS 2| |AS 5|
+----+ +----+
|provider provider|
| |
| |
|customer customer|
+-----------------+ +----------+
| |
backup (192.0.2.0/25) | |primary service (192.0.2.0/25)
primary (192.0.2.128/25)| |backup service (192.0.2.128/25)
+----+
|AS 1|
+----+
Figure 2
The intended configuration has all incoming traffic for addresses in
the range 192.0.2.0/25 via the link from AS5, and all incoming
traffic for addresses in the range 192.0.2.128/25 from AS2.
In this case, if the link between AS3 and AS4 is reset, AS3 will
learn both routes from AS2, and AS4 will learn both routes from AS5.
As these customer routes are preferred over peer routes, when the
link between AS3 and AS4 is restored, neither AS3 nor AS4 will alter
their routing behavior with respect to AS1's routes. This situation
is now wedged, in that there is no eBGP peering that can be reset
that will flip BGP back to the intended state. This is an instance
of a BGP Wedgie.
The restoration path here is that AS1 has to withdraw the backup
advertisements on both paths and operate for an interval without
backup, and then re-advertise the backup prefix advertisements. The
length of the interval cannot be readily determined in advance, as it
has to be sufficiently long so as to allow AS2 and AS5 to learn of an
alternate path to AS1. At this stage the backup routes can be re-
advertised.
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
4. Multi-Party BGP Wedgies
This situation can be more complex when three or more parties provide
upstream transit services to an AS. An example is indicated in
Figure 3.
+----+ peer peer +----+
|AS 3|------------------------|AS 4|
+----+ +----+
||provider provider|
|+----------------+ |
| | |
|customer |customer |
+----+peer peer+----+ |
|AS 2|-----------|AS 5| |
+----+ +----+ |
|provider provider| |
| | |
| | |
|customer customer| customer|
+---------------+ |+---------+
backup service| ||primary service
+----+
|AS 1|
+----+
Figure 3
In this example, the intended state is that AS2 and AS5 are both
backup providers to AS1, and AS4 is the primary provider. When the
link between AS1 and AS4 breaks and is subsequently restored, AS3
will continue to direct traffic to AS1 via AS2 or AS5. In this case,
a single reset of the link between AS2 and AS1 will not restore the
original intended BGP state, as the BGP-selected best route to AS1
will switch to AS5, and AS2 and AS3 will learn a path to AS1 via AS5.
What AS1 is observing is incoming traffic on the backup link from
AS2. Resetting this connection will not restore traffic back to the
primary path, but instead will switch incoming traffic over to AS5.
The action required to correct the situation is to simultaneously
reset both the link to AS2, and also the link to AS5. This is not
necessarily an intuitively obvious solution, as at any point on time
only one of these links will be carrying backup traffic, yet both BGP
sessions need to be brought down at the same time in order to
commence restoration of the intended primary and backup state.
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
5. BGP and Determinism
BGP does not behave deterministically in all cases, and, as a
consequence, there is intended and unintended non-determinism in BGP.
For example, the default final tie break in some implementations of
BGP is to prefer the longest-lived route. To achieve determinism in
this last step it would be necessary to use a comparison operator
that has a predictable outcome, such as a comparison of router
identifiers. This class of non-deterministic behavior is termed here
"intended" non-determinism, in that the policy interactions are, to
some extent, predictable by network administrators.
BGP is also able to generate outcomes that can be described as
"unintended non-determinism" that can result from unexpected policy
interactions. These outcomes do not represent misconfiguration in
the standard sense, since all policies may look completely rational
locally, but their interaction across multiple routing entities can
cause unintended outcomes, and BGP may reach a state that includes
such unintended outcomes in a non-deterministic manner.
Unintended non-determinism in BGP would not be as critical an issue
if all stable routings were guaranteed to be consistent with the
policy writer's intent. However, this is not always the case. The
above examples indicate that the operation of BGP allows multiple
stable states to exist from a single configuration state, where some
of these states are not consistent with the policy writer's intent.
These particular examples can be described as a form of "route
pinning", where the route is pinned to a non-preferred path.
The challenge for the network administrator is to ensure that an
intended state is maintained. Under certain circumstances this can
only be achieved by deliberate service disruption, involving the
withdrawal of routes being used to forward traffic, and
re-advertising routes in a certain sequence in order to induce an
intended BGP state. However, the knowledge that is required by any
single network operator administrator in order to understand the
reason why BGP has stabilized to an unintended state requires BGP
policy configuration knowledge of remote networks. In effect, there
is insufficient local information for any single network
administrator to correctly identify the root cause of the unintended
BGP state, nor is there sufficient information to allow any single
network administrator to undertake a sequence of steps to rectify the
situation back to the intended routing state.
It is reasonable to anticipate that the density of interconnection
will continue to increase, and the capability for policy-based
preference settings of learned and re-advertised routes will become
more expressive. Therefore, it is reasonable to anticipate that the
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
number of unintended but stable BGP states will increase, and the
ability to define the necessary sequence of route withdrawals and
re-advertisements will become more challenging for network operators
to determine in advance.
Whether this could lead to a BGP routing system reaching a point
where each network consistently cannot direct traffic in a
deterministic manner is, at this stage, a matter of speculation. BGP
Wedgies illustrate that a sufficiently complex interconnection
topology, coupled with a sufficiently expressive set of policy
constructs, can lead to a number of stable BGP states, rather than a
single intended state. As the topology complexity increases, it is
not possible to deterministically predict which state the BGP routing
system may converge to. Paradoxically, the demands of inter-domain
traffic engineering appear to require greater levels of expressive
capability in policy-based routing directives, operating across
denser interconnectivity topologies in a deterministic manner. This
may not be a sustainable outcome in BGP-based routing systems.
6. Security Considerations
BGP is a relaying protocol, where route information is received,
processed, and forwarded. BGP contains no specific mechanisms to
prevent the unauthorized modification of the information by a
forwarding agent, allowing routing information to be modified or
deleted, or for false information to be inserted without the
knowledge of the originator of the routing information or any of the
recipients.
This memo proposes no modifications to the BGP protocol, nor does it
propose any changes to the manner of deployment of BGP, and therefore
introduces no new factors in terms of the security and integrity of
inter-domain routing.
This memo illustrates that, in attempting to create policy-based
outcomes relating to path selection for incoming traffic, it is
possible to generate BGP configurations where there are multiple
stable outcomes, rather than a single outcome. Furthermore, of these
instances of multiple outcomes, there are cases where the BGP
selection of a particular outcome is not a deterministic selection.
This class of behaviour may be exploitable by a hostile third party.
A common theme of BGP Wedgies is that starting from an intended or
desired forwarding state, the loss and subsequent restoration of an
eBGP peering connection can flip the network's forwarding
configuration into an unintended and potentially undesired state.
Significant administrative effort, based on BGP state and
configuration knowledge that may not be locally available, may be
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
required to shift the BGP forwarding configuration back to the
intended or desired forwarding state. If a hostile third party can
deliberately cause the BGP session to reset, thereby producing the
initial conditions that lead to an unintended forwarding state, the
network impacts of the resulting unintended or undesired forwarding
state may be long-lived, far outliving the temporary interruption of
connectivity that triggered the condition. If these impacts,
including potential issues of increased cost, reduction of available
bandwidth, increases in overall latency or degradation of service
reliability, are significant, then disrupting a BGP session could
represent an attractive attack vector to a hostile party.
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[RFC 1771] Rekhter, Y. and T. Li, "A Border Gateway Protocol 4
(BGP-4)", RFC 1771, March 1995.
7.2. Informative References
[RFC 1997] Chandrasekeran, R., Traina, P., and T. Li, "BGP
Communities Attribute", RFC 1997, August 1996.
Authors' Addresses
Tim G. Griffin
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
EMail: Timothy.Griffin@cl.cam.ac.uk
Geoff Huston
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre
EMail: gih@apnic.net
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RFC 4264 BGP Wedgies November 2005
Full Copyright Statement
Copyright © The Internet Society (2005).
This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions
contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors
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Griffin & Huston Informational PAGE 10
BGP Wedgies
RFC TOTAL SIZE: 24139 bytes
PUBLICATION DATE: Saturday, November 19th, 2005
LEGAL RIGHTS: The IETF Trust (see BCP 78)
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