What are
bogon routes?
Bogons are martians
(private and reserved addresses defined by RFC1918, RFC5735 and RFC 6598) and net
blocks that have been allocated to a regional internet registry (RIR) by the
internet assigned numbers authority (IANA).
A bogon
prefix is a route that should never appear in the internet routing table
therefore packets routed over the public internet with a source address in a
bogon range should be discarded.
Why should
bogon prefixes be a concern to ISP network administrators?
Bogons are
used by malicious internet users and hackers to launch DDoS attacks and IP
address spoofing. In fact, most of the frequently attacked sites, 60% of the
naughty packets were obvious bogons.
What should
you do as an ISP network administrator to guard your network against bogons?
You need to
filter and reject or discard bogon routes at your BGP edge router so they don’t
enter your routing table as valid destinations. Filtering should be done on
both the ingress and egress direction because similarly you don’t want to
advertise bogon prefixes to your upstream provider.
However, if
you choose to filter bogons you need to have a plan to keep your filters update
because these lists change every day especially the full bogon list which has
significant changes every day.
You can find
the full bogon IPv4 and IPv6 lists here.
Bogon
filtering is good and a wise decision but you have to be committed to
maintaining it every day, if you just download a full bogons list once and use
it to filter at your BGP router without updating it, it will become out of date
very quickly and you will end up blocking legitimate traffic.
A good idea
is to peer with bogon route servers, it’s a free service and you can apply here.
In this way, your bogon prefixes will be automatically
updated. Any changes in the full bogon prefixes will immediately be reflected
in your BGP router which saves you from what would otherwise be a rigorous
daily routine of downloading and updating your full bogon lists.
