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The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) offers several knobs to control routing decisions, but they are coarse-grained and only affect routes received from neighboring Autonomous Systems (AS). To enhance policy expressiveness, BGP was extended with thecommunitiesattribute, allowing an AS to attach metadata to routes and influence the routing decisions of a remote AS. The metadata can carryinformationto (e.g., where a route was received) or request anactionfrom a remote AS (e.g., not to export a route to one of its neighbors). Unfortunately, the semantics of BGP communities are not standardized, lack universal rules, and are poorly documented. In this work, we design and evaluate algorithms to automatically uncover BGPaction communitiesand ASes that violate standard practices by consistently using theinformation communitiesof other ASes, revealing undocumented relationships between them (e.g., siblings). Our experimental evaluation with billions of route announcements from public BGP route collectors from 2018 to 2023 uncovers previously unknown AS relationships and shows that our algorithm for identifying action communities achieves average precision and recall of 92.5% and 86.5%, respectively. 

Given the technical flaws with—and the increasing non-observance of—the TCP-friendliness paradigm, we must rethink how the Inter- net should manage bandwidth allocation. We explore this question from first principles, but remain within the constraints of the In- ternet’s current architecture and commercial arrangements. We propose a new framework, Recursive Congestion Shares (RCS), that provides bandwidth allocations independent of which congestion control algorithms flows use but consistent with the Internet’s eco- nomics. We show that RCS achieves this goal using game-theoretic calculations and simulations as well as network emulation. 

Enterprises increasingly use public cloud services for critical business needs. However, Internet protocols force clouds to contend with a lack of control, reducing the speed at which clouds can respond to network problems, the range of solutions they can provide, and deployment resilience. To overcome this limitation, we present PAINTER, a system that takes control over which ingress routes are available and which are chosen to the cloud by leveraging edge proxies. PAINTER efficiently advertises BGP prefixes, exposing more concurrent routes than existing solutions to improve latency and resilience. Compared to existing solutions, PAINTER reduces path inflation by 75% while using a third of the prefixes of other solutions, avoids 20% more path failures, and chooses ingresses from the edge at finer time (RTT) and traffic (per-flow) granularities, enhancing our agility.