Finding and Mitigating the Risk of Vulnerabilities in BGP Implementations

Forescout Vedere Labs recently disclosed three new vulnerabilities on a popular Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) open-source implementation. These vulnerabilities highlight message parsing as an often-overlooked aspect of BGP security and they could be exploited to achieve a denial of service on vulnerable peers, thus dropping all sessions and routing tables.

Recent BGP incidents show that it might take only a malformed packet to cause potentially large disruptions since software suites implementing BGP are used by major networking vendors and found in ISPs and large data centers. Therefore, organizations should not rely only on their ISPs to handle BGP security.

This research shows that modern BGP implementations still have low-hanging fruits that attackers can abuse. Learn how we found the three new vulnerabilities, what their risk is, and what to do to mitigate these risks.