INGI Seminar - Location Inference of BGP Communities

by Thomas Krenc de CAIDA

BGP Communities are an essential signaling mechanism between BGP routers, enhancing network scalability and automation. They are opaque identifiers that convey nuanced routing policies. However, their meanings are mostly undisclosed, with less than 1% of networks sharing their community mappings publicly, leaving over 80,000 routed communities undocumented.

In order to better understand routing in the Internet, we envision to infer the meanings of all communities. We started with successfully differentiating information and action communities, the two coarse-grained categories, with an accuracy of >95%. Our current efforts focus on inferring finer-grained categories of information communities, e.g., those that encode a routers location. We further develope a method to assign lat-long coordinates to location communities.