Deprecation of BGP Path Attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243
draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129-02

Abstract

This document requests IANA to mark BGP path attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated".

Status of This Memo

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This Internet-Draft will expire on July 2, 2017.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. IANA Considerations
• 3. Security Considerations
• 4. Informative References
• Appendix A. Acknowledgements
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

It has been discovered that certain BGP Path Attribute values have been used in BGP implementations which have been deployed in the wild while not being assigned by the IANA for such usage. Unregistered usage of BGP Path Attribute values can lead to deployment problems for new technologies.

The use of these unregistered values was noticed when BGP Large Communities attribute [I-D.ietf-idr-large-community] was initially assigned value 30 by IANA. It was subsequently discovered that a widely-deployed BGP-4 [RFC4271] implementation had released code which used path attribute 30 and which applied a "Treat-as-withdraw" [RFC7606] strategy to routes containing a valid Large Community attribute, since it was expecting a different data structure. Because these routes were dropped, early adopters of Large Communities were unreachable from parts of the Internet. As a workaround, a new Early IANA Allocation was requested.

The squatting of values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242 and 243 has been confirmed by the involved vendors or through source code review.

2. IANA Considerations

Per this document, IANA is requested to mark values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated" in the "BGP Path Attributes" registry under the "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Parameters" group. The marking "deprecated" meaning "use is not recommended" ([I-D.leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis]).

3. Security Considerations

There are no meaningful security consequences arising from this registry update.

4. Informative References

Appendix A. Acknowledgements

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge Marlien Vijfhuizen who helped discover the squatting of value 30, and Nick Hilliard for editorial feedback.

Author's Address