Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP ) is the de facto routing protocol of the Internet. It offers built-in mechanisms to allow entities, represented by Autonomous Systems (ASes), to express how they want to send and receive traffic on the Internet.
What happened
One such mechanism is path attributes , which carry essential routing information and metadata for their associated route. The path selection algorithm processes some of these path attributes in a deterministic sequence to calculate the best path for this specific prefix. The floor is firmer here because the story is anchored by an official source, not only by second-hand reaction. With devices, practical impact usually shows up in battery life, heat, stability, and long-term usability rather than in a few flashy headline numbers.
Details worth keeping
Using our unique position on the Internet, we took an investigative look at one of the well-known mandatory attributes in BGP, the ORIGIN attribute. ORIGIN must be present in every BGP prefix announcement and should not be modified by any router after being set by the originating one. What we found through our own experiments was a dramatic ~70% of observed paths in numerous vantage points have a different ORIGIN value compared to what was set by the originating Autonomous System. This ORIGIN attribute manipulation has a significant impact on the way traffic is forwarded on the Internet, as we’ll explore in this post.
Why this deserves a click
The ORIGIN attribute indicates how a route was injected into BGP — not to be confused with the origin AS that indicates which AS announced a route. It has three possible values:. The readers who should care most are the ones planning to replace a device, buy an accessory, or upgrade a work setup in the next few months. For devices, the next question is always real hardware, long-term stability, and the gap between stage promises and daily use.
Patrick Tech Media take
(1) EGP: A historical value indicating that the route was learned via the old Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP) , which is obsolete and not intended to be used in the modern Internet. For devices, the next question is always real hardware, long-term stability, and the gap between stage promises and daily use. That is why the useful reading move is not to stop at the headline, but to compare the promise, the workflow change, and the likely cost before deciding anything.
What is still unclear
Among total observable routes from all the public BGP collectors of RIPE RIS and RouteViews , 89. 8% have ORIGIN set to IGP, 3. 5% to EGP, and 6. 7% are INCOMPLETE. As mentioned above, EGP is meant to be deprecated entirely and INCOMPLETE carries a minority share of total routes. These figures suggest that while IGP is by far the most popular value for ORIGIN, more than 10% of routes have an EGP or INCOMPLETE value that could make a difference in routing decisions.