Description

On 27 August 2010, the RIPE NCC's Routing Information Service (RIS) was involved in an experiment using optional attributes in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). As a result of this experiment, a small, but significant percentage of global Internet traffic was disrupted for a period of about 30 minutes.  Details of the BGP Transitive Attribute experiment can be found here:

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/erik/ripe-ncc-and-duke-university-bgp-experiment/

That same day, Cisco published a security advisory regarding a known Cisco IOS XR Software Border Gateway Protocol Vulnerability:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20100827-bgp.shtml


Symptoms

Is Junos vulnerable to the BGP Transitive Attribute corruption issue uncovered by RIPE NCC?

Solution

Junos is not affected by this issue.

Extensive review and testing by both internal and external parties has confirmed that Junos is unaffected by the BGP Transitive Attribute corruption issue uncovered by RIPE and Duke University.  Junos strictly adheres to RFC 4271 which, in part, requires that received unrecognized optional transitive attributes are accepted, while receipt of a corrupted update (or a corrupted attribute within an update) causes a NOTIFICATION to be sent back to the peer, followed by termination of the TCP session.  Lab testing shows that when the experimental update was received from RIPE by a Junos router, the update was processed per RFC.  However, if the update was passed through an affected router, thereby corrupting the update, Junos would send a NOTIFICATION and tear down the session to the affected peer.

No other Juniper Networks products are affected by this issue.

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