I think that focusing on researchers (who we assume are good-intentioned) misses the point. Any connected BGP speaker can inject any form of ugliness. The routers that mishandled these updates were bounded by routers that were able to 'properly' handle corrupted updates. The question of aggressive teardown of BGP sessions after a speaker receives garbage has been well considered for a long time. Stop the problem at the edges. The only difference here is that the edge moved one hop closer to the core. /c Sent from my iPhone On Aug 28, 2010, at 7:31 AM, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
* Randy Bush:
imiho, researchers injecting data into the control plane are responsible to have tested it at least against major bgp speakers.
Practically, this boils down to "don't do that", which is certainly fine by me.
To carry out such experiments responsibly, you have to conduct so much testing beforehand that the live test on the actual Internet will not yield new insights (assuming you did your pre-experiment testing properly).