Quantitative analysis of incorrectly-configured bogon-filter detection

Abstract

Newly announced IP addresses (from previously unused IP blocks) are often unreachable. It is common for network operators to filter out address space which is known to be unallocated (“bogon” addresses). However, as allocated address space changes over time, these bogons might become legitimately announced prefixes. Unfortunately, some ISPs still do not configure their bogon filters via lists published by the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Instead, they choose to manually configure filters. Therefore it would be desirable to test whether filters block legitimate address space before it is allocated to ISPs and/or end users. Previous work has presented a methodology that aims at detecting such wrongly configured filters, so that ISPs can be contacted and asked to update their filters. This paper extends the methodology by providing a more formal algorithm for finding such filters, and the paper quantitatively assesses the performance of this methodology.