James [mailto:haesu@towardex.com] wrote:

They are not playing with the core. The result of what they are doing is dependent on specific topology and level of direction they are throwing prefixes at.

While I will not dispute your statement, I believe that every ASN should be responsible of their own and should not trust the General Internet to not cause harm on their network. If your router is going to crash b/c of someone advertising an unusual AS_PATH, I don't view that differently from a box getting owned because it was running unpatched OS since 1999 without any firewall rules either. -J

I think most of the concern comes from the fact that this "experiment" is being done on a network that many people rely upon for various reasons, and it's unknown side effects have are in the scope of global financial/communication/emergency crisises. It might not cause any harm, but I'd think you guys could have probably come up with a better test bed than using other people's equipment and networks without permission and risking unforseen disasters. Why wasn't this experiment tested in a lab environment? We don't test new pharmaceuticals directly on humans in the first round of testing, and after they've been proven safe on animals, the tests then go on to compensated volunteers.... Even if this type of experiment fell into compliance with the RFCs, it surely wasn't the intended use of AS-PATHS and should be considered experimental, and therefore tested in a lab setting. The risks imposed by using the global internet routing infrastructure as your testbed far outweigh any benefits your tool might realize. If this "experiment" that you're running causes downtime for someone elses systems, are you willing to pay for the damages? -Brian