On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 16:24 -0700, Tony Li wrote:
For example, an operator can begin by enabling authentication on a BGP speaker that is wholly outside of the traffic path. Instability of this one speaker would have no effect on production traffic. Authentication alarms generated by this speaker could be set up to do nothing more than send a syslog message to operations personnel who would need to intervene manually to actually change production BGP path selection. For testing authentication, a host behind this speaker could monitor reachability.
In short, you mean setting up, eg a Quagga box behind the existing core infra that one has, feeding it a full feed, which matches the current best paths one has in it's RIB and verifying the paths. This is somewhat similar how the detection of GRH (*1) works already for IPv6 tables, that is it nightly fetches the route6 objects from various registries(*1) and checks if a AS is registered to be allowed to announce a certain prefix, if not it marks it in the looking glass as being a bad route which is supposed to be routed from the registered AS. Now, if BGP would have some signature over the the path, one could verify this in the same method and have the exact thing happening above. GRH sends out mailings every day, though one could of course implement the above in realtime. If one would mirror the full table, one could even analyze the alternative paths to see if those are valid. What you mention, does indeed not break current operations and would be quite transparent. Greets, Jeroen *1 = http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/ *2 = http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/how/