Background
Researchers and Engineers of Tsinghua University, under its initiated Joint IPv4/IPv6 project supported by Chinese Government, have developed a platform – called BGPWatch – which gives a full landscape of BGP routing and analyzing view by displaying the bi-directional routing path between Autonomous Systems, the incidents about route hijacking, the identity of the victims and the attackers, the hijacking statistics, the routing topology and many other features.
With the support of APNIC ISIF project called “Developing a Collaborative BGP Routing Analyzing and Diagnosing Platform”, this platform has been further developed by Tsinghua team based on the technical advice and experiences provided by the 17 NREN partners, including AARNET, APAN-JP, BdREN, CERNET, DOST-ASTI, ERNET, HARNET, ITB, KREONET, LEARN, MYREN, NREN, PERN, REANNZ, SingAREN, ThaiREN, and TransPAC(APAN Routing Working Group).
What is BGP?
We are using computers or mobile phones and internet in our day-to-day life. But how are these devices connected to the internet? Computers are connected through wired or wireless media into an Ethernet Switch to form a Local Area Network or LAN in brief. A number of LANs get interconnected using a Router to form a Wide Area Network. Such a Network under a single administration is called an “Autonomous System”. So, an autonomous system is a large network or group of networks managed by a single organization. Internet is an integration of millions of such Autonomous System. Each computer is identified by an exclusive IP Address. This helps it in taking part in communicating with the other computers. A packet containing the IP Address of the destination computer gets routed as it passes through the networks to reach its desired destination. How does the packet find its route? It is the routing protocol which defines the route that the packet traverses through. There are two types of routing protocol. Within the Autonomous System, the packet is routed using Interior Routing Protocols like RIP, OSPF, IS-IS and similar others. But if the packet goes to another network under the purview of another organization or another AS, routing takes help of Exterior Routing Protocol. The most pervasive and widely used protocol in this case is Border Gateway Protocol, popularly known as BGP. Any of the routers in the Internet gets the routing information of all the network addresses using BGP. Hence, it can route the traffic in the best available path determined by BGP. Each BGP router stores a routing table with the best routes between autonomous systems. BGP always favors the shortest and the least-cost path as the packet traverses from AS to AS in order to reach the destination network. Truly speaking, BGP is the road map of the Internet.
The URL:
The URL to this platform is: https://bgpwatch.cgtf.net/