Summary

  • A 2 November individual Internet-Draft proposes attributable commitments about an AS’s expected BGP behavior for specified neighbors, routes, directions and conditions.
  • Its key authority rule says a future model should not infer control of routing policy merely from an ASN registration or ownership of an address prefix. The person publishing the promise must have authority to speak for the operation.

A registry can tell you who holds an AS number. It cannot operate that network’s export filter. The new Inter-Domain Routing Behavior Commitments draft makes that distinction the first hurdle for a proposed way to describe and assess BGP promises. A declaration might say that an AS will export a specified route class to one neighbor under defined conditions. The draft asks who issued the statement, whose AS is the subject, and what authority lets the issuer make that promise. Section 6.1 says the model should not infer routing-policy authority solely from prefix ownership or ASN registration.

That sentence is the story. Number records, address resources and the hands that change routing policy can belong to different actors. Section 2.2 says a future model must distinguish those three kinds of authority when they diverge. The issuer may be the AS itself or someone authorized to act for it. A neighboring AS is another actor entirely. A unilateral declaration by AS A cannot bind AS B; where their accounts conflict, the model must keep the two statements attributable to their separate issuers.

The promise also needs edges. The proposal scopes a commitment by connection, route class, direction, operating condition, exception and validity period. A requirement, a prohibition, a permission and a preference have different meanings; the draft forbids treating them as interchangeable. Existing BGP Roles in RFC 9234 describe a relationship on a session. The draft’s question is wider: who takes responsibility for a particular behavior, and what observation could assess it?

An outside collector sees a slice of the network. A BGP UPDATE observed at one point can show an announcement there. Silence at that point cannot prove the AS never announced the route to another neighbor. The draft therefore requires observation points, intervals, provenance, coverage and an “indeterminate” assessment when the evidence runs out. It also requires versioning and withdrawal, because yesterday’s commitment may not govern today’s peering arrangement.

The IETF Datatracker lists an individual draft updated 2 November. The missing evidence is a real declaration, proof that its issuer controls the relevant routing policy, and observations covering the named neighbors and period. Those records would turn the proposed authority test into an operational one.