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Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 6d8f89e509 policy, fib: blackhole routing for routes with the BLACKHOLE community
ci / check (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / docs (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / interop (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / fuzz (push) Canceled after 0s
Before this change, a route carrying the BLACKHOLE community (65535:666,
RFC 7999) from an EBGP neighbor was always rejected with the reason
"blackhole request", and nothing discarded traffic. A customer under a
denial-of-service attack had no way to ask this router to drop traffic
to an address.

This change adds `accept_blackholes` to the import policy. When it is
set, a route with the BLACKHOLE community is accepted if:

* its prefix is a single address, a /32 or a /128 (otherwise it is
  rejected with the new reason "blackhole for more than one address");
  the `max_ipv4_prefix_length` and `max_ipv6_prefix_length` limits do
  not apply, as RFC 7999 section 3.2 recommends;
* the address is inside a prefix the neighbor may announce, if
  `prefixes` is configured, regardless of the entry's `max_length`
  (new `PrefixSet::covers`); without a prefix list, an address inside
  the local AS's own prefixes is rejected as before ("prefix is our
  own");
* the AS path, origin and RPKI checks that apply to every route pass.

The next hop of an accepted blackhole route is not checked for
third-party addresses and is not resolved, because traffic is never
forwarded to it. The route takes part in best path selection as usual;
a host route is normally the active route for its address.

The kernel task installs the active route as a kernel blackhole route
(`RTN_BLACKHOLE`, shown by `ip route` as `blackhole PREFIX proto bgp`).
Blackhole routes left by an earlier run are adopted at startup like
other routes of ours. The route is advertised to other neighbors as the
export policy and export limits permit, with the community intact, so a
provider that honors BLACKHOLE can discard the traffic upstream.

Implementation:

* `plan::Target` becomes an enum: `Via { gateway, interface }` or
  `Discard`. `plan::resolve` takes a `blackhole` flag and returns
  `Discard` for such routes without looking at the next hop (the
  own-network check still applies). No nexthop object is made for a
  discard target.
* `AttrSet::is_blackhole` reads the community off the stored attribute
  bytes, like `next_hop` and `as_path`, so the kernel task, the
  revalidator and the RPKI revalidation can ask it of every route.
* `ImportPolicy::is_blackhole_request` and `check_blackhole_prefix`
  carry the import side; the import flow (`routes.rs`) computes once per
  UPDATE whether its routes are an accepted blackhole request and skips
  the next hop checks for them.
* `Status::blackholes` and the `blackholes` field of `/api/kernel` count
  the installed blackhole routes; the status page shows the count next
  to the installed routes.

Not covered: a prefix this router originates with the BLACKHOLE
community is advertised but not installed as a blackhole route. The
documentation says to add a kernel blackhole route by hand for that
case.

Documentation: the "Blackhole Routes" section of the import policy
guide replaces "Blackhole Requests", the kernel guide gains a "Blackhole
Routes" section, the configuration reference describes
`accept_blackholes`, the HTTP API reference describes `blackholes`, and
the RFC 7999 rows of the standards reference are updated.

Testing: unit tests for the attribute check, the prefix checks and the
plan; integration tests that a blackhole request is refused by default
and, with `accept_blackholes`, taken for one address inside the peer's
space and refused otherwise, with the recorded reasons; a kernel test
that a blackhole request becomes a kernel blackhole route whatever its
next hop, is removed on withdrawal and is adopted after a restart. The
existing kernel tests, the interoperability lab and the workspace tests
pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-08 23:08:50 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 3608897245 fib: resolve next hops through the kernel's routing table
Before this change, Ferrix only installed a route if its BGP next hop was
directly connected: an address in the subnet of an interface that is up.
A route with any other next hop was held at import and never installed.
This made routes from iBGP neighbors unusable unless the neighbor set
itself as the next hop, and it is why the route reflector rewrites the
next hop on every reflected route.

Ferrix now resolves a next hop that is not directly connected through the
kernel's own routes, as other BGP implementations do:

* The route is looked up in one kernel table, the "resolution table"
  (`kernel { resolution_table: N }`, default 254 = main). The longest
  prefix that contains the next hop wins; of several routes for that
  prefix, the one with the lowest metric.
* Because the Linux kernel does not resolve gateways recursively, the BGP
  route is installed with the gateway and interface of the kernel route
  that covers the next hop. A kernel route without a gateway (a route
  onto a point-to-point or tunnel interface) makes the next hop itself
  the gateway on that interface. A kernel route that names a nexthop
  object is resolved through the object.
* Routes with protocol `bgp` never resolve a next hop, whether Ferrix's
  own or another daemon's. A next hop that is reachable only through a
  BGP route depends on another BGP next hop, and such chains are not
  predictable.
* The default route does not resolve a next hop unless
  `kernel { resolve_via_default_route: true }` is set. On a router the
  default route points at a transit provider, and a next hop that is
  reachable only through it is not usable.
* Blackhole, unreachable and prohibit routes make the next hop
  unresolvable, as does a route whose interface is down.

The same resolution is used by the import policy and the revalidator, so
a route whose next hop cannot be resolved is still held rather than
selected (RFC 4271 section 9.1.2.1), and is taken when a kernel route
makes its next hop resolvable.

Implementation:

* `bgp_fib::routes::KernelRoutes` holds the routes of the resolution
  table and answers longest-prefix lookups.
* `bgp_fib::topology::Topology` bundles the interfaces, the kernel routes
  and the kernel's nexthop objects into one value. The kernel task
  publishes it through `Fib::topology()` (formerly `Fib::interfaces()`),
  and `plan::resolve` takes it in place of `Interfaces`.
* The kernel task learns the resolution table with a dump of that table
  alone, using NETLINK_GET_STRICT_CHK (Linux 4.20 and later; older
  kernels get a dump of every table, filtered in user space). It asks
  again, debounced, whenever a dedicated netlink socket that is a member
  of the route multicast groups receives anything. That socket is given a
  64 KiB receive buffer on purpose: the kernel reports Ferrix's own route
  installs on it too, up to a million at a time, and an ENOBUFS overflow
  is treated as the same hint as a message. Its contents are never
  parsed. An earlier attempt to receive route notifications on the
  socket that writes routes failed, because the kernel only excludes the
  requesting socket from a notification when NLM_F_ECHO was requested.
* `Unresolved::NotConnected` is replaced by `NoRoute`, `OnlyDefault` and
  `Discarded`, which appear as the reasons in `/api/kernel` and on the
  status page.

Configuration: two new `kernel` fields, `resolution_table` and
`resolve_via_default_route`, documented in the configuration reference
and in the kernel guide, whose "Next Hop Resolution" section is rewritten.
Existing configurations behave as before except that routes with far
next hops may now be installed where a static or connected route covers
the next hop.

Testing: unit tests for `KernelRoutes`, `Topology` and resolution
through static, tunnel, nexthop-object, blackhole and default routes; a
kernel test (`a_far_next_hop_goes_the_way_the_kernels_routes_say`) that
checks the installed routes follow static, tunnel and nexthop-object
routes as they are added, replaced and removed; the existing kernel
tests, the interoperability lab with FRR and BIRD, and the workspace
tests, all passing. Installing 200,000 routes still runs at about
186,000 routes per second.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-08 22:23:27 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 277b973f1a Status page: what moved, what is missing, and a dark room
The attention strip's names lead to the peer's row, which lights up for a
moment. The IPv4 and IPv6 sessions of one neighbour (NAME-v4, NAME-v6) are
listed together, joined down the side, the name said once in full. A route
count that moved by more than 2% between refreshes carries ▲ or ▼ for two
minutes; a row whose state or count changed while the tab was in the
background carries ● until it is clicked. A compact mode drops the next
hop and session columns, and is remembered by the browser. Colours are
variables, with a second set for prefers-color-scheme: dark.

A new per-peer `expected_routes` says about how many routes a peer sends
when all is well. The daemon only passes it to the API; the page lists an
established peer with under half of it as needing attention, a minute
after the session came up, with the expected count beside the actual one.
An established session with next to no routes looked, until now, exactly
like one that was fine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-07 23:16:01 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 1ce7eef27e Status page: what needs attention first, glyphs for what repeats
The page opened with every session in bold green, the normal state, and
the brightest numbers on it were the rejection counts, which RPKI doing
its job produces by the thousand. The two sessions that were actually
down were in the same red, thirty rows down. Now:

- A status line at the top says what needs attention, by name and with
  the reason: sessions down, peers restarting, the kernel behind or
  refusing routes, RPKI data missing or about to expire. When nothing
  does, it says so. A second line gives the normal state in grey.
- Colour means one thing each. Red: failed, needs a hand. Amber:
  degraded, worth watching. Green, set small: a system doing its job.
  Grey: inactive and expected. Normal is black; "Established" is no
  longer green, and a rejection count no longer red.
- Peers that need attention come first, then the others grouped by what
  they are to us, with a "problems only" switch. Numbers are right
  aligned with thousands separators; the established time and uptime
  are one cell; the session's properties are glyphs (v4, v6, GR, ENH,
  AP, 2B) with the meaning as a tooltip, as are the roles.
- Received routes: the best route leads, marked ★; attributes without a
  column are glyphs (OTC, AA, AGG, AS4, OID, CL); validity is ✓ ✗ –.
- Rejected routes: those alike (same prefix, reason and path) are one
  row with a count and the last time; each peer's reasons are a bar.
- Communities with a configured name (community_names, new) are badges
  with that name, the number as the tooltip: "comrack", "SwissIX",
  "interconnection 2011" rather than 210036:100:2 and so on. A name for
  a pattern shows the open part after it. The daemon does nothing with
  the names but pass them to the page.
- One lookup box at the top, which takes a peer's name too; a peer's
  name anywhere on the page leads to its routes; table headers and the
  status line stay in view while scrolling.
- The host name comes from gethostname(2), not from running `hostname`,
  which a static binary on a bare machine could not find: comrack said
  "unknown host".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-06 17:49:06 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 3b22e318a2 Server: one way to work on the table off-thread, and smaller tidying
Removing a peer's routes, sweeping its stale ones and sweeping the
attribute sets were each written out as their own spawn_blocking, and
each dealt with a failed task differently: the periodic sweep dropped a
panic on the floor, and a restarting peer whose kept routes could not be
removed was logged as "removed 0 routes". off_thread does it once, and
every caller logs a failure.

Also:
- the hard-reset wrapping of a NOTIFICATION is one function in the FSM;
- the two ways to close every session are one, and the registry has one
  leave() rather than leave() and shutdown();
- the dialer says why a session ended with SessionEnd::reason, and no
  longer turns a result into a result;
- as_path_prepend is parsed in one place, and the limits in error texts
  come from the constants rather than being written out;
- router_id and cluster_id are parsed by one function;
- the exporter builds its Egress in one place;
- the fields a session keeps only to hand to its handle are fewer:
  route_refresh is a bool, not a copy of the families;
- counting the stale routes removed cannot underflow;
- docs that had gone stale: the proto still said there was no route
  reflection, the advertiser's module doc said it announced only our own
  routes, from_server listed two of its five sources, and so on.

Tests for what had none: which session ends count as restarts, the Hard
Reset wrapping, the graceful restart settings, the dialer's jitter,
withdrawals in MP_UNREACH_NLRI, and AS_TRANS on a two-octet session.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-06 11:15:58 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 c9751883c4 Passive peers: configured, and left to connect
A session could only be configured for a peer we would then dial, every
few seconds to two minutes, for as long as it was not up. A new peer
whose side was not ready yet filled the log with failed attempts, and a
peer that opens its sessions itself was dialled for nothing.

A peer with `passive: true` is not dialled. A connection from its address
is taken as for any configured peer, and the session comes up with all
that is configured for it: role, import policy, export limits,
hold-downs. Until then the status page and /api/peers show it as
`Passive`, waiting for the peer to connect; after a session, with how
that session ended, which nothing else would say since nobody dials it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-06 00:05:54 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 9cfd3f67f0 Export limits, and a role for every peer where routes are passed on
What other networks were told of rested on one thing: the Only to
Customer mark that routes from providers, peers and route servers get as
they come in. A route without it, from a session without a role or by a
mistake anywhere along the way, went to every peer, from every router of
ours, and nothing of ours stood in the way.

export_limits are a second check, independent of the roles, the marks
and the export policy. For peers above or beside us (PROVIDER, PEER,
ROUTE_SERVER, and any in another AS without a role):

- prefixes: only routes for these go out, learned or our own. With our
  and our customers' space listed, a leak of anyone else's routes goes
  nowhere above us.
- max_prefixes: if more routes were to go out than this, none of them
  does. The session ends with a Cease / Administrative Shutdown whose
  Shutdown Communication says why (RFC 9003), and the peer is held down
  for its import.hold_down_seconds, so that it is told nothing rather
  than too much. The whole table is counted before any of it is sent.

They are set at the top and hold for every such peer that has none of its
own; unlike `export`, a peer's own export policy does not drop them. A
peer's own export_limits take their place, and an empty one lifts them.
Customers, route server clients and our own routers are not limited.

A configuration in which learned routes are passed on and a peer in
another AS has no role is now refused, as is accept_unconfigured_peers
with learned routes: without a role, a peer's routes go to everyone and
it is told of everything. This used to be a warning.

At startup, a warning for each peer the limits apply to that has none,
and for each originated route the limits leave out. A metric,
bgp_export_limit_exceeded_total, counts the sessions ended for it.

The interop lab has a phase in which a customer leaks: a route outside
its space never reaches BIRD, and when more were to go than the limit,
BIRD's session ends and its log has our reason.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-05 23:10:43 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 b16227c51f Route reflection, with ourselves as next hop
A route learned from one router of our AS went to no other (RFC 4271
§9.2.1), so every router needed a session with every other. A router at
the end of a single link, with one session to its neighbour inside the AS,
heard only of what that neighbour learned itself, and nothing of what the
neighbour had from the routers behind it.

A peer in our own AS can now be made a route reflector client
(`route_reflector_client`, RFC 4456). What a client sends goes to all our
routers; what the others send goes to the clients. A reflected route gets
ORIGINATOR_ID (where it started, if it does not say) and our cluster ID at
the front of CLUSTER_LIST; it is not sent back to the router it started
at, nor round to a cluster it has been through, and one that comes back
anyway is refused as "route reflected back to us". The cluster ID is the
router ID unless `cluster_id` says otherwise. The two attributes are now
decoded as such rather than kept as bytes, and are never sent to other
networks.

Unlike a standard reflector, this one is the next hop of what it reflects,
as it is of everything it announces: there is no resolving a next hop
that is not a neighbour, so a client reaches what lies behind another
router through the reflector.

Only peers in our own AS can be clients; the configuration refuses the
setting for any other. Nothing changes in what other networks are told:
Only to Customer marks go along with reflected routes, and every
receiving session keeps its own max_prefixes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-05 18:10:35 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 4e945b278f Import rules: preference and communities for some routes only
The import policy did the same to every route of a session. Now `rules`
can do more to some of them: those with certain communities, those for
certain prefixes, or both. Each rule can set the local preference and put
communities on; each route takes the first rule that holds for it.

Rules see a route as the session's own statements leave it, with our
communities taken off and the session's marks put on. So a router can act
on where another router of ours learned a route, by the mark that router
put on it, and a customer's single prefix can be marked for a prepend.

Routes of one UPDATE that different rules hold for go into the table with
attribute sets of their own. An UPDATE that no rule touches is taken as
before, without its attributes being written out again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-05 16:34:17 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 72444c2706 Control communities: session groups, prepends, and only ours to give
Control communities could say which peers a route goes to, by AS. Now
they can also name sessions by group, and ask for prepends:

  L:11:P .. L:13:P   our AS once to three times more towards AS P
                     (P 0: towards every peer in another AS)
  L:20:G / L:21:G    not to / only to the sessions of group G
  L:31:G .. L:33:G   our AS once to three times more towards group G

A group is a number given to sessions in the configuration (`groups` of
a peer): those at one exchange, or those over one link. The same network
at two exchanges is one AS but two sessions, which is what steering
inbound traffic between exchanges needs. Of several prepends that apply
the most counts, on top of the session's own as_path_prepend. Functions
2 to 9, as the documentation already promised, and 100 and up stay
informational; 10 to 99 are kept for actions to come.

They are acted on where a route leaves our AS, and taken off there; our
informational communities are not. To a peer in our own AS a route goes
with them, unchanged, so that a mark put on at one router is acted on at
another. Before, they were acted on and taken off on internal sessions
too, so a route marked "to nobody" did not even reach our own routers.

And they are ours to give: the communities of our own AS (L:n, L:n:m,
and 0:n where control communities are on) are taken off every route
from a peer in another AS as it comes in, before import marks are put
on. A peer at an exchange could otherwise decide where its routes go
from us, and set our informational marks. A customer that is to steer
its own routes is given import.accept_control_communities. An UPDATE
without any of ours is still taken as it came, without being written
out again.

This changes what a customer that set control communities gets: it now
needs accept_control_communities. The transit example and the interop
lab say so; the lab also has FRR, as a customer, ask for a prepend
towards BIRD's group, and BIRD, as a provider, have its "not to" taken
off.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-05 16:12:05 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5 65f136048e Graceful restart (RFC 4724, RFC 8538)
A peer that restarts keeps its routes with us, and we keep ours with our
peers while we restart, so that a restart withdraws nothing across the
network and the machine goes on forwarding. On by default for every
peer; `graceful_restart` sets the restart time we give, caps how long a
peer's routes are kept, or turns it off.

When a peer restarts: its routes are marked stale in the routing table,
and chosen as before, for at most its restart time. When it is back, what
it sends again is fresh, and the stale routes of a family go at its
End-of-RIB marker, or after the cap; at once for a family whose
forwarding it did not keep. Only a connection that failed counts as a
restart, and, with RFC 8538 agreed, an expired hold timer or a
NOTIFICATION other than a Hard Reset. The stale mark is a bit of the
route's word that selection never looks at.

When we restart: SIGUSR1 leaves the kernel's routes where they are,
closes the sessions without a word where graceful restart is agreed, and
exits with status 75, on which the systemd unit starts us again. The next
start finds the routes in the kernel, says so in its OPENs (R, and F where
forwarding was kept), and has them go once every peer has sent its
End-of-RIB. Our own End-of-RIB markers for learned routes wait for that
too. SIGTERM still stops for good, now with a Hard Reset where RFC 8538 is
agreed, as are errors of ours.

The status page and API show what was agreed with each peer, the routes
kept while a peer restarts, and which routes are stale. Tested against
FRR and BIRD in a new phase of the interoperability lab, and with routes
kept in a real kernel over a restart.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-04 22:43:47 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 1e2e8f2d86 Pass learned routes on to peers, with marks and control communities
What was to be scripted is configuration, done natively:

- import { add_communities, add_large_communities, remove_communities,
  local_pref }: every route taken from a peer is marked (where it was
  learned, say), with nobody else's word for our marks taken, and given
  its preference, which selection goes by.
- export { add_communities, add_large_communities, remove_communities,
  as_path_prepend, learned_routes }, for a peer or for all that have none
  of their own.
- control_communities: the communities by which routes say which peers
  they are passed on to, as exchanges' route servers have them (0:P, L:P,
  0:L, and the large forms L:0:P, L:1:P, L:0:0), taken off as the route
  goes on.

And what the last of these is for: with export.learned_routes a peer is
told the best route of every prefix the others announced. The rules are
BGP's and cannot be turned off: not back where it came from, not to a
peer whose AS is on the path, not between two internal peers, not past
NO_EXPORT or NO_ADVERTISE; our AS on the path and ourselves as next hop
to another network, LOCAL_PREF to our own; to a route server's client
the path, MED and next hop as they came (RFC 7947). Which routes go where
follows from the roles of RFC 9234: a route that came down or across goes
on down only, so that with roles on every peer this makes us transit for
our customers and nothing else. A peer without a role is told everything,
and the daemon says so at startup.

Each session follows the table's best routes with a reader and keeps the
prefixes it has announced, so that it can withdraw them. Routes that go
out alike go in one UPDATE: changes are gathered for 50 ms first, and a
table that is given out anew is gathered whole (at most four sessions at
a time; it is tens of megabytes). For that to work the table's journal
had to give out together what was written together: every change now
carries a time on a table-wide clock, a reader's pass reads every shard
up to one time, no further than the changes that are complete in every
shard, and a resync takes its places in the journals as of one time.

One peer sending 1.23 M routes over a session, another told of them:
in our table after 0.47 s, all heard after 2.1 s, four routes an UPDATE.
The lab has a phase, transit: FRR as our customer and BIRD as our
provider, routes each way with the right paths and marks, one kept back
by a community, and pings between their networks through us.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 23:48:08 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 9367c38907 Remove policy scripts
Rhai made a decision about a route cost one to three microseconds,
some two hundred times what the same costs in Rust. That was bearable
where a function is asked once for an UPDATE, and is not where every
route is weighed against every peer, as it is when routes are passed
on. What is wanted of a policy (mark routes by where they came from,
mark what is announced, let communities say who is told what) needs no
language; it is to be configuration, done natively.

Kept from that work: route selection goes by a LOCAL_PREF that policy
set on a route from an external peer, and the lab's configuration can
be added to by a phase.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 22:47:57 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 cbf0df1eef Policy scripts: the operator's own rules for routes, in Rhai
A new crate, bgp-policy, runs functions of a script on routes: on their
way in, after the general checks of a peer's import and before the
checks that can change (RPKI, next hop reachability); and on their way
out to a peer. A function is given the route and the peer, may refuse
the route, and may change its communities, large communities,
LOCAL_PREF and MED, and on the way out prepend our AS:

    fn from_peer(route, peer) {
        if route.has_community("65535:666") { return false; }
        route.add_community(LEARNED_FROM[peer.role]);
        route.local_pref = PREFERENCE[peer.role];
        true
    }

Configuration: policy { path | source, import_function, export_function }
and, for a peer, import { function } and export { function }. The script
is compiled at startup; `bgp --check` reads it and says which function
is whose. A function that fails on a route has refused it. Scripts have
no files, network or clock, and are stopped after 200,000 steps.

Route selection now goes by a LOCAL_PREF on a route from an external
peer: the decoder never lets a peer's own through, so one that is there
was set by policy.

What it costs was measured before it was built on (benches/policy.rs):
a call that tests a few communities and changes two takes 1 to 3
microseconds, some two hundred times what Rust would. So a function is
asked once for the routes of an UPDATE, which share their attributes,
unless it asks for the prefix. One peer sending 1.23 M routes over a
session: 0.37 s without a function, 0.80 s with one that marks and
ranks every route, 3.4 s if it also looks at the prefix.

Export applies to what is announced, which today is what the daemon
originates; learned routes are not passed on yet.

Tested by unit tests of the crate, sessions end to end, a fuzz target on
the example script (testdata/policy.rhai), and a lab phase in which a
script changes which of FRR's and BIRD's route is chosen and what each
of them is told.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 21:09:39 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 9ca86ede2f Harden import, the kernel task and the RTR client after review
Three independent reviews (hijack resistance, reliability, code health)
of the whole tree. This is what they found that could let a bad route in
or take the daemon down.

Hijacks:
- A route had two paths on a two-octet session, AS_PATH and AS4_PATH,
  read in two places by two rules. A peer could make the origin checked
  on import differ from the one checked at revalidation, and get an
  RPKI-invalid route into the table. AS4_PATH is now merged into AS_PATH
  once, on receipt (RFC 6793 §4.2.3), and nothing else knows of it.
- The next hop is judged on import: it must be usable, agreed on
  (RFC 8950), and by default the peer itself.
- Our own originated prefixes are not taken from other networks.
- A route for a network the machine is on is never put in the kernel.
- Paths with an AS_SET are refused (RFC 9774).
- A configured peer gets one session, not one per BGP Identifier.
- More IPv6 special-purpose prefixes are bogons.

Reliability:
- A batch of requests the kernel refused could overflow the netlink
  socket and end the daemon. The socket has room now, a lost answer or a
  silent kernel means asking what is there, and neither is fatal.
- Working the routes out again within the grace period after a restart
  no longer drops the routes being kept.
- That work can no longer be put off for ever by interface changes.
- Peers whose sessions keep failing are slowed down.
- Unused attribute sets are swept when they pile up, not only each
  minute.
- Log lines a peer can cause are said once in a while.
- An RTR answer is bounded in size and time; data cannot expire between
  two refreshes.
- The shard of a key is taken from a stirred hash: neighbouring bits of
  the hash proved alike for prefixes in a row. The test that showed it,
  failing one run in sixteen, is deterministic now.

The lab has a phase, hijacks, in which FRR tries the first three.
route::apply is a struct with methods instead of nested closures, and
the kernel task's loop is shorter.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 19:13:40 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 fd2248feb5 Peer at link-local addresses: fe80::1%eth0
A peer's endpoint may be a link-local IPv6 address with the interface it
is on. Such a peer is the address and the interface together, wherever
peers are told apart: admission, collisions, hold-downs, the refusal log,
the status page. The interface is looked up by name each time it is
needed, so one that appears later or is made anew is found.

Our routes go out with our link-local address in both places of
MP_REACH_NLRI's next hop, as FRR sends its own. A peer's link-local next
hop is taken alone, twice, or after "::" (BIRD), and resolved in the
kernel on the interface of the session rather than by looking fe80::/64
up, which every interface has.

The lab has a new phase, linklocal: sessions with FRR (by interface, with
radvd beside the daemon) and BIRD over a LAN with link-local addresses
only, both families, pings across, the interface down and up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 18:24:13 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 321af51e4b Add an interoperability lab with FRR, BIRD and Routinator
scripts/interop/lab.sh runs the daemon against FRR, BIRD and Routinator,
each in a network namespace on one exchange LAN, and checks what every
side ends up with: sessions and routes over IPv4 and IPv6 with their
attributes, four-octet AS numbers, ADD-PATH, RFC 9234 roles and Only to
Customer, RTR version 2 and invalid routes, route refresh, session resets,
killed peers, a cut wire, the daemon stopped and killed, a table of a
million routes and a restart under it, role mismatch and the prefix limit.
All of it passes against FRR 10.5.1, BIRD 2.18 and Routinator 0.15.2.

scripts/interop/real-rpki.sh checks the RTR client against a Routinator
with the real RPKI: 713,258 IPv4 and 187,479 IPv6 VRPs and 3,379 ASPAs,
the same numbers on both sides.

What the lab found, fixed here:

- A daemon restarted with its routes in the kernel removed them all at
  once, its table being empty until the peers had sent theirs again, and
  then put them back: no forwarding meanwhile. Routes of an earlier run
  are now kept for `stale_seconds` (120 by default) and only those nobody
  announced again are removed. A restart under a million routes takes
  1.1 s to be in step, with nothing removed.
- FRR ends a session it loses to a collision with a state machine error
  without a subcode, which was shown as "error code 5 subcode 0".

CI gets a job that runs the lab.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 17:44:49 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 1de75fc610 Install a full table in the kernel in about a second
A million IPv4 routes took 1.6 s to install (release build); they take
1.1 s now, and 0.5 s to remove instead of 1.15 s. Most of what is left is
the kernel's own work on each route.

- Nexthop objects (Linux 5.3 and later): a gateway is put in the kernel
  once and routes name it, so the kernel checks it once and not for every
  route. The daemon makes its own objects, uses nobody else's, is told
  when one of its own is removed and puts it back, and removes them when
  it stops, which takes all the routes that name them along at once.
  `without_nexthop_objects` turns this off; a kernel without them is
  noticed and served as before.
- Writing to the kernel is a task of its own, fed through a short queue,
  so the next batch is worked out while the kernel is busy with the last.
  "In step" is said when the kernel has done the batch that completes the
  table, not when it was handed over.
- What a next hop resolves to is kept, by next hop: it was looked up among
  the machine's addresses for every route.
- A quicker hash for the plan's maps, and no lookups in the ones that are
  empty.

Fixes a hole found on the way: when an interface went down and came back
within the second it takes us to react, the kernel had dropped our routes
and we did not put them back, since nothing about them had changed for
us. After such a change the kernel is now asked what it actually has.

scripts/in-namespace.sh runs one command in a scratch namespace;
FERRIX_ROUTES sets the size of the timing test.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 17:13:44 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 1fc44798b7 Install best routes in the Linux kernel over netlink
New crate bgp-fib. It follows the routing table's best routes and keeps
the kernel's routing table the same, and learns the machine's interfaces
and addresses from the kernel, which is what says whether a next hop can
be reached.

- netlink: the rtnetlink messages used (routes, addresses, links, errors),
  as bytes and back. No I/O; property tested and fuzzed.
- interfaces: what is directly reachable, and from which interface.
- plan: what to ask the kernel for, given the best routes and what the
  kernel has. No I/O; tested against a model kernel.
- kernel (Linux only): the sockets and the task. Requests go in batches;
  routes of ours found at startup are kept if still right and removed if
  not; a change of interfaces has every route worked out again; a clean
  stop removes our routes.

Only routes marked proto bgp with the configured table and metric are
ever touched. A best route is installed if its next hop is a neighbor;
next hops further away are not resolved through other routes yet, and
such prefixes are counted and shown instead.

Configured with `kernel { table metric }`; off by default. The daemon
needs CAP_NET_ADMIN and stops if the kernel refuses it. On shutdown it
closes sessions and then removes its routes.

/api/kernel and the status page show installed, unresolved and refused
counts, the last error and the interfaces; five bgp_kernel_* metrics.

Testing: scripts/kernel-tests.sh runs, in network namespaces of their
own and with only the capabilities the daemon needs, the installer
against `ip route`, the daemon with a peer, and two daemons that route
for each other with pings across over IPv4 and IPv6.
scripts/linux-vm.sh runs that, or anything else, in a Lima VM from
macOS. CI runs the kernel tests and fuzzes the netlink decoder.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 15:15:43 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 f9ef781d51 Check roles in OPEN and prevent route leaks with Only to Customer (RFC 9234)
A peer's configured role now does three more things:

- Our OPEN carries the BGP Role capability with what we are to the peer.
  A peer whose own says it is something that does not pair with that, or
  that sends two different roles, is refused with OPEN Message Error /
  Role Mismatch. A peer that says nothing is accepted unless require_role
  is set. A role on a peer in our own AS is a configuration error.
- Routes from a provider, a peer or a route server are marked Only to
  Customer on the way in if they are not already, and our routes are
  marked on the way out to a customer, a peer or a route server client.
- A marked route from a customer or route server client, or from a peer
  with someone else's mark, is a leak and is refused. No policy setting
  turns that off.

The packet crate gains the Only to Customer attribute (malformed:
treat-as-withdraw), and the Role Mismatch subcode is corrected from 8 to
11.

The status page shows whether the peer confirmed its role.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 14:27:36 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 8086aa994f Verify AS paths with ASPAs, over RTR version 2
Origin validation says who may originate a prefix and nothing about the
rest of the path: it does not catch a route leak, nor a hijack that keeps
the right origin at the end of a made-up path. ASPAs, in which a network
lists its providers, do.

bgp-rpki:
- aspa: the ASPAs and the upstream and downstream verification procedures
  of draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification-24, tested against the draft's
  wording as written.
- rtr: protocol version 2 (draft-ietf-sidrops-8210bis-23) with the ASPA
  PDU and the new error codes.
- client: asks for version 2 and falls back to whatever older version the
  cache speaks; keeps ASPAs with the VRPs, applied whole or not at all;
  publishes which customers' ASPAs changed; tells the cache why it is
  being left (Error Report); does not ask one version's serial of another.

Server:
- A peer has a role (provider, customer, peer, route server, route server
  client), which decides how its paths are verified. Without one they are
  not.
- A route whose path is invalid is refused ("ASPA invalid") and held, like
  one with an invalid origin; accept_aspa_invalid exempts a peer.
- When ASPAs change, routes in the table whose path has a changed customer
  on it are verified again, and held routes are released when they pass
  both checks.
- The revalidator finds a route's peer by index instead of searching a
  list for every route.

The status page and API show each peer's role, each route's path validity,
the number of ASPAs and the RTR version in use; bgp_rpki_aspas is on
/metricz.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 14:12:59 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 bdaf226a16 Validate route origins against the RPKI and refuse invalid routes
With rpki { caches { ... } } in the configuration the server keeps the
validated ROA payloads of a validator and validates every route from a
peer outside its own AS (RFC 6811). An invalid route is refused, unless
its peer has accept_rpki_invalid. Valid and not-found routes are taken;
validity does not otherwise enter route selection.

Validity is not settled when a route arrives: the data changes every few
minutes. The routes follow, without the peer sending anything again.

- A route refused as invalid is held by its session, out of the table.
  When the data changes the session looks at what it holds, and what is
  no longer invalid goes into the table. A held route is the peer's to
  withdraw or replace like any other.
- A route in the table that becomes invalid is found by a task that
  looks through the table when the data changes, at the prefixes the
  changed VRPs cover, and is taken out and held by its session.
- If the data expires because no cache confirms it, nothing is invalid
  any more and everything held is taken.
- A session holds at most 200,000 routes; past that it asks the peer for
  a route refresh when the data changes.

So that the table can be looked through without parsing attributes, an
attribute set's key now has the route's origin AS. Memory per route is
unchanged at 52 bytes on the real table.

Shown: /api/rpki and a section of the status page with the cache, its
state and the age of the data; each route's validity; each peer's count
of held routes. Refusals are recorded under "RPKI invalid". Metrics:
bgp_rpki_vrps and bgp_rpki_updates_total.

Also: Negotiated says whether the peer supports route refresh, and
docs/RFCs.md is brought up to date.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 13:39:40 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 e2b1979e38 Judge every route a peer announces: import policy, prefix limit, hold-down
A configured peer could announce any prefix with any path, in any
number, and all of it was stored and could be chosen as best. Each
peer now has an import policy, and every route goes through it before
it reaches the routing table.

Checks that hold for any peer unless turned off for it:
- no prefixes that are not routed on the Internet (private, loopback,
  link-local, documentation, multicast, reserved; for IPv6, anything
  outside global unicast);
- nothing longer than /24 or /48, no default route, nothing shorter
  than /8 or /16;
- no reserved, private or documentation AS number in the path;
- a path that begins with the peer's own AS (turned off for a route
  server), and of at most 64 AS numbers.

Always: a route with our own AS number in its path is refused. RFC 4271
requires this loop check and it was missing.

Per peer, if configured: the prefixes it may announce, each with an
optional longest more-specific, and the AS numbers its routes may
originate from. This is the list generated from the routing registries.

max_prefixes limits how many routes a peer may have. One more ends the
session with Cease / Maximum Number of Prefixes Reached, and the peer
is kept down for hold_down_seconds (ten minutes unless set): its
connections are not taken and it is not dialled. Refused routes do not
count towards the limit.

A refused route is withdrawn rather than ignored, so that it replaces
whatever the peer had announced for it before.

On a session with two-octet AS numbers the path is judged with its
AS4_PATH merged in, so that the real AS numbers are what is checked.

Peers that are not configured (accept_unconfigured_peers, for test
networks) get a policy that takes everything but loops.

Refusals are counted in bgp_routes_rejected_total by reason. The status
page and /api/peers show, for each session, how many routes the peer
has and how many were refused. The server warns at startup about peers
with no limit.

The prefix check costs about 4 ns a route with the default policy; the
end-to-end benchmark is unchanged.

Also: the benchmark's server AS is one that is in none of its generated
paths, and a table test that depended on the hasher's seed is fixed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 12:59:37 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 630c175918 Rework the speaker: sans-I/O FSM, sharded table, RFC 7606, ADD-PATH
The work of the speaker-cleanup branch as one commit; the branch keeps
the step-by-step history.

Sessions
- The state machine is a pure function from events to actions, driven by
  one task per connection. Idle, Connect and Active belong to a dialer
  that keeps configured peers up with backoff.
- Capabilities are negotiated: address families, four-octet AS numbers
  with AS_TRANS and AS4_PATH, route refresh, ADD-PATH per family and
  direction.
- Collision detection per RFC 4271 section 6.8, by address and
  identifier.
- Connections are taken only from configured peers, a few per address.
- A panic in a session is contained and answered with a Cease; a core
  task that stops shuts the server down with a Cease to every peer.
- Writes that make no progress are given up (RFC 9687).

Codec
- Malformed UPDATEs are handled as RFC 7606 says: treat-as-withdraw,
  attribute discard, or session reset, with the NOTIFICATION to send.
- Address families are open types; any can be named and ignored.
- Prefixes are fixed-size values, normalised, with path identifiers.
- Lengths are filled in after writing; one definition of each type code.
- Property tests and fuzz targets for every decoder.

Routing table
- Adj-RIBs-In and Loc-RIB in one sharded table that sessions write to
  directly. Routes are sixteen bytes; attribute sets are interned in
  wire form. Best-path selection per RFC 4271 section 9.1.2.2 with
  deterministic MED.
- A journal per shard lets followers read changes at their own pace;
  one that falls behind is resynchronised.
- On a RIPE RIS dump of 148 peers and 39.3M routes: loaded in 2.0 s on
  12 cores, about 52 bytes a route.

Announcing
- Originated routes come from the configuration. Each session has its
  own exporter with an Adj-RIB-Out, so a slow peer delays only itself.
- Routes to a peer in our own AS have an empty path and a LOCAL_PREF.

Operations
- HTTP status page, JSON API, event stream and Prometheus metrics.
- Benchmarks on synthetic and real tables.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-02 12:35:54 +02:00
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Sonnet 4.6 1ec60255ea feature: BGP server, FSM, Adj-RIB-In actor, and integration tests
- Implement passive-side BGP FSM (OpenSent → OpenConfirm → Established)
  with hold timer, keepalive timer, and NOTIFICATION on expiry
- Add bgp-server crate: config validation, TCP listener accept loop
  (BgpServerBuilder → BgpServer), connection dispatch
- Add bgp-rib crate: Adj-RIB-In actor owning route state with event
  broadcast for streaming consumers and snapshot for introspection
- Wire Adj-RIB-In into FSM: announce/withdraw on UPDATE for both legacy
  IPv4 NLRI fields and MP_REACH/MP_UNREACH path attributes
- Add bgp-integration-tests crate with 15 end-to-end tests covering
  session establishment, timers, UPDATE handling, and RIB introspection
- Fix require_empty! macro bug in open.rs (checked wrong buffer)
- Fix FourByteAsn capability parser returning consumed buffer as remainder
- Fix tracing subscriber not being installed in TracingArgs::install
- Expand docs/RFCs.md with full implementation status across 15 RFCs

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-19 00:21:51 +02:00
Rayhaan Jaufeerally 5ae8f6e249 Cleanup and implementation of Update / Notification parser / serializers. 2026-04-18 12:58:51 +02:00