Towards Inferring Inter-Domain Routing Policies in ISP Networks

BGP dictates routing between autonomous systems with rich policy mechanisms in today's Internet. Operators translate high-level policy principles into low-level configurations of multiple routers without a comprehensive understanding of the actual effect on the network behaviors, making the routing management and operation an error-prone and time-consuming procedure. A fundamental question to answer is: how to verify the intended routing principles against the actual routing effects of an ISP? In this paper, we develop a methodology RPIM (Routing Policy Inference Model) towards this end. RPIM extracts from the routing tables various policy patterns, which represent certain high-level policy intentions of network operators, and then maps the patterns into specific design primitives that the ISP employs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to infer routing policies in ISP networks comprehensively from the aspects of business relationship, traffic engineering, scalability and security. We apply RPIM to 11 ASes selected from RIPE NCC RIS project, and query IRR database to validate our approach. Vast majority of inferred policies are confirmed by the policy registries, and RPIM achieves 96.23% accuracy excluding validation difficulties caused by incompleteness of the IRR database.