BGP Vortex: Update Message Floods Can Create Internet Instabilities

Felix Stöger, Henry Birge-Lee, Giacomo Giuliari, Jordi Subira-Nieto, Adrian Perrig

34th USENIX Security Symposium · Day 1

The Border Gateway Protocol (**BGP**), the foundational inter-domain routing protocol of the Internet, faces persistent challenges in maintaining stability and ensuring rapid convergence of routing tables. This paper, "BGP Vortex: Update Message Floods Can Create Internet Instabilities," introduces the discovery of a critical vulnerability termed the **BGP Vortex**. Discovered by Felix Stöger, Henry Birge-Lee, Giacomo Giuliari, Jordi Subira-Nieto, and Adrian Perrig, the BGP Vortex is a specific configuration where a mere three legitimate BGP UPDATE messages can trigger a state of persistent instability within the Internet's routing infrastructure.

AI review

This is the kind of foundational Internet infrastructure research that makes you rethink assumptions everyone's been operating under for two decades. Three legit BGP messages can put chunks of the Internet into a persistent oscillation state that bypasses RPKI and BGPSEC entirely. Real discovery, real experiments, real implications.