2025-10 Rewriting BGP Origin @ RIPE91

Abstract:

"This 1 trick IP transit providers don't want you to know" - would be the title of this talk if it was a Substack blog post. Everyone is playing games to attract more traffic, one of those is to rewrite the BGP origin attribute, but it's not being talked about, so let's talk about it.

In this talk I will present how the largest carriers are rewriting the BGP origin attribute in order to attract more traffic to their network. It's nothing new, but anyone not doing this looses out. As an IP transit provider, we've tried to resist but the problem isn't going away, so we want to talk about it publicly.

UPDATE: after giving this presentation it was discovered that AS3320 were incorrectly listed as one of the networks that rewrite the origin attribute. This is not the case. I have update the slides attached to this presentation to correct this.

 

Link to slides and video at RIPE: https://ripe91.ripe.net/programme/meeting-plan/sessions/30/GJ8PFJ/

Local mirror of slides (pdf): RIPE91 - BGP Origin Type.pdf

 

---