> On Aug 7, 2025, at 5:34 AM, Joe Abley <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I prepended 1221 to the routes I went towards US providers for the purpose of > poisoning those routes and making them unacceptable to 1221 routers who might > otherwise learn them. > > This was effective. It served a purpose. It wasn't malicious and it wasn't > intended to impersonate anybody or hijack anything. The 1221 people knew I > was doing it, and perhaps they had given up complaining about my shenanigans > by that point but they didn't tell me to stop. > > I have always thought of AS_PATH as a loop avoidance mechanism, and that's > precisely how it was being used here. > > Was it wrong? Was it a bad idea? If you (collectively) think yes, can you say > why?
While this is one of the few public admissions of such behavior, it's not the only one I've known about. In spite of the operator celebrations for RFC 9774 finally shipping, I wasn't exactly thrilled to work on it, and mostly got involved because the RFC 4271 surgery was a tricky mess. (The danger of having an opinion.) AS_SETs are a lovely place to drop such poisoning. I suspect we'll regret losing this as a tool at some point. That said, BGP security tools are steadily removing such things as a viable tool, and we're probably better off for it. -- Jeff _______________________________________________ GROW mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
