BGPFuzz: Automated Configuration Fuzzing of the Border Gateway Protocol

TL;DR

BGPFuzz is an innovative fuzzing framework that systematically mutates BGP configurations to detect misconfigurations and anomalies, enhancing network security and stability without relying on static correctness properties.

Contribution

It introduces a structure-aware, stateful fuzzing approach for BGP configurations that effectively identifies misconfigurations through runtime anomaly detection.

Findings

Successfully reproduces known BGP failures

Detects anomalies like session resets and traffic redirection

Reveals misconfigurations caused by complex or vendor-specific settings

Abstract

Telecommunications networks rely on configurations to define routing behavior, especially in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), where misconfigurations can lead to severe outages and security breaches, as demonstrated by the 2021 Facebook outage. Unlike existing approaches that rely on synthesis or verification, our work offers a cost-effective method for identifying misconfigurations resulting from BGP's inherent complexity or vendor-specific implementations. We present BGPFuzz, a structure-aware and stateful fuzzing framework that systematically mutates BGP configurations and evaluates their effects in virtualized network. Without requiring predefined correctness properties as in static analysis, BGPFuzz detects anomalies through runtime oracles that capture practical symptoms such as session resets, blackholing, and traffic redirection. Our experiments show that BGPFuzz can reliably reproduce and detect known failures, including max-prefix violations and sub-prefix hijacks.