How do you update and audit your BGP security policy to comply with the latest standards and best practices?

1 Assess your current policy

To assess your current BGP security policy, identify any gaps, weaknesses, or inconsistencies, and detect any anomalies, misconfigurations, or attacks, you should use tools like BGPAlerter, BGPmon, or BGPlay. Additionally, compare your policy with best practices recommended by industry groups such as MANRS, RPKI, or BGPsec. When assessing your policy and procedures, consider questions such as how do you filter and validate the routes you receive and announce? How do you protect your BGP sessions from unauthorized access or hijacking? How do you handle routing incidents and communicate with your peers and customers? How do you document and review your policy and procedures?

2 Update your policy accordingly

The next step is to update your policy according to the findings of your assessment and the latest standards and best practices. To ensure the best security, you should use prefix filters and route origin validation to prevent route leaks and spoofing, BGPsec or TCP MD5 to secure your BGP sessions, RPKI or ROAs to certify your route origin and authority, AS_PATH filters and max-prefix limits to prevent AS_PATH manipulation, graceful shutdown or BGP communities to signal maintenance or outage events, BGP peering agreements and SLAs to define expectations and obligations with peers and customers, as well as BGP policy templates and automation tools to simplify configuration and management.

3 Audit your policy regularly

The final step is to audit your policy regularly to ensure its effectiveness and compliance. You should perform periodic checks and tests to verify that your policy is working as intended and that you are not violating any rules or agreements. You should also monitor your BGP activity and performance and collect data and metrics to evaluate your policy outcomes and impacts. You should also review your policy and update it as needed to reflect any changes in your network, goals, or environment. You should also seek feedback and collaboration from your peers and customers to improve your policy and resolve any issues or disputes.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?