Expanding Internet Routing Visibility with BMP#

Thomas Holterbach (University of Strasbourg), joint work with Thomas Alfroy and Cristel Pelsser

• Why: Two of the PM's interests converge here: BGP internals and routing-security visibility. The talk quantifies exactly what standard BGP-based collectors (RIPE RIS, RouteViews) cannot see and proposes BMP as the fix.
• What: A new next-gen route-collection platform, bgproutes.io, which inverts the priorities of RIS/RouteViews: it prioritizes coverage (percentage of ASes sharing data) over historical depth, with perpetual data retention and an open peering policy. Context: only ~1.2% of ASes share data with existing platforms; the new project got ~40 peers in ~1 year. The central technical argument: even when an operator shares data via BGP, inbound/outbound filters and the best-path decision process hide most routes ("BGP route hiding") — denied routes and backup paths are invisible, and Add-path only partially helps (and loses the per-peer mapping). BMP exposes route updates at every stage of the BGP pipeline.
• How: BMP sessions export per-peer, per-stage RIBs (adj_in_pre, adj_in_post, local_rib, adj_out_pre, adj_out_post). Their operational recommendation: export adj_in_pre only — one BMP session on a multi-peer router yields data equivalent to dozens of vantage points (their RGNET example: 7 BGP sessions replaced by 2 BMP sessions = 10 VPs). Onboarding is fully automated via PeeringDB login, with an opt-out list for peers you don't want to export. Data access in three forms: MRT archive (bulk), API (slices), websocket (realtime), with Python clients (pybgproutesmrt, pybgproutesapi, pybgprouteslive) that make the collection protocol transparent and also aggregate RIS and PCH data.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable — any operator with BMP-capable routers can peer (MikroTik notably lacks BMP support). The dataset is public and intended to power next-gen BGP monitoring tools; the looking-glass example in the deck is directly reusable. Academic–operator collaboration, not vendor-backed.