Bongo: A BGP Speaker Built for Defending Against Bad Routes

Abstract

Hijacks, outages, route leaks, and AS path spoofing are cases where network operators may want to influence the way routes are accepted and propagated from BGP neighbors in ways not supported by traditional BGP speakers. In this paper, we introduce Bongo, a software-based BGP speaker than can selectively filter out or extend the path of BGP updates received from other peers based on arbitrary operator-defined policies. Additionally, we show how the modularity of this system makes it easy to integrate with existing routers as well as other network devices such as OpenFlow switches or firewalls.