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Recent BGP leak that redirected internet traffic through Russia

The first installment of our new blog series, Beyond Their Intended Scope, covers BGP mishaps that may have escaped the community’s attention but are worthy of analysis. In this post, we review a recent BGP leak that redirected internet traffic through Russia and Central Asia as a result of a path error leak by Uztelecom, the incumbent service provider of Uzbekistan.

While the lower portion of the visualization shows a pruned ball-n-stick AS-level diagram, the upper graph depicts the ASes observed upstream of Amazon’s ASN (AS16509) for this route by count of BGP vantage points. As depicted in the upper graph of the visualization below, this prefix is normally present in the tables of just over half of our BGP sources — likely a regional route with intentionally limited propagation to steer traffic in only this part of the world. The report cited my recent collaboration with Job Snijders of Fastly on RPKI ROV adoption, a technology that aims to reduce the disruption caused by things like BGP route leaks.

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