During the last week, two recent IETF drafts have proposed to simplify some important aspects of the operation of BGP.

• The first draft, Revised Error Handling for BGP Updates from External Neighbors proposes to reconsider how erroneous messages are handled on an eBGP session. According to the current BGP specification, a router that receives a malformed BGP Update must send a notification and close the BGP session. Two weeks ago, during an experiment, researchers from Duke sent BGP messages containing a new attribute. Unfortunately, these messages were considered to be erroneous by one major BGP implementation. This caused multiple BGP session resets and huge traffic losses.
• The second draft, entitled, Deprecation of BGP AS_SET proposes to deprecate the AS_SETs. AS_SETs have been introduced in BGP to ease the aggregation of prefixes announced by multiple stub ASes. However, this aggregation mechanism is seldom used today. Furthermore, these AS_SETs cause problems for the ongoing work in securing BGP.

We'll see during the coming months whether these proposals are accepted or quietly ignored by vendors and operators. There are probably other ways to simplify BGP...