Suppressing BGP Zombies with Route Status Transparency (RoST)#
NSDI '25 digest Program Core pick 28–30 April 2025
- Authors / tier: Yosef Edery Anahory, Yossi Gilad (Hebrew University of Jerusalem); Jie Kong, Nicholas Scaglione, Justin Furuness, Amir Herzberg, Bing Wang (University of Connecticut); Hemi Leibowitz (College of Management Academic Studies). Core.
- Why: Withdrawal suppression ("zombie" routes that stay active after withdrawal) has been a known BGP weakness for over a decade, with real reliability and security consequences. This is the first systematic defense, relevant to anyone tracking inter-domain routing security alongside RPKI.
- What: RoST lets an AS efficiently and securely verify whether a route has actually been withdrawn, defeating both misconfiguration-driven and adversarial withdrawal suppression.
- How: A verification scheme that is compatible with BGP and composes with existing BGP security enhancements (rather than replacing them). The design targets efficient per-route status checks.
- Where applicable: Inter-domain routing broadly; an incrementally deployable addition to BGP/RPKI-style security rather than a clean-slate redesign.