RPIM: Inferring BGP Routing Policies in ISP Networks

BGP dictates routing between autonomous systems with rich policy mechanisms in today´s Internet. Operators translate high-level policy objectives into low-level router configurations without a comprehensive understanding of the actual effects on the network behavior, leaving the routing management an error-prone and time-consuming procedure. A fundamental question is: how to verify the intended routing principles against the actual routing effects of an ISP? In this paper, we develop a Routing Policy Inference Model (RPIM) as the first step towards addressing this fundamental issue. RPIM extracts various policy patterns from the BGP routing tables and translates them into high-level policy objectives of the ISP using a grouping and matching technique. Our work bridges the gap between the high-level policy objectives and the actual routing effects, which provides network operators with a novel approach to verify their policy design principles, thus facilitating the routing management. We evaluate our approach by extensive simulations using the Internet AS-level topology from CAIDA and the real routing data from the Abilene network. Simulation results show that RPIM achieves over 78.94% average inference accuracy in our suggested optimal threshold range. We also verify RPIM on several operating ISPs by the registered policies in an Internet Routing Registry (IRR). A representative case study on AS3292 demonstrates that RPIM effectively infers high-level policy objectives from routing data.