Susan Hares

A router can finish explaining a new route before it finishes carrying packets over it. RFC 4098 names the first event in the control plane; RFC 7747 measures the second from outside the forwarding plane. Susan Hares co-authored both documents. Read together, they turn the word “converged” from a reassuring status into a claim that must disclose its clock.

A reachability update tells a router where packets may go. A FlowSpec update can tell it which packets to slow, discard, remark or redirect. That change in consequence makes authority—not syntax—the hard part. Susan Hares's documented work on the revised FlowSpec standards helps show how a compact BGP rule becomes acceptable only when its right to act can be derived from the routing system around it.

Susan Hares’s attributed work across BGP, BGP–OSPF interaction, and programmable routing-state requirements shows how routing control becomes operationally accountable: policy must be located, state transitions bounded, authority authenticated, and failure behavior defined, while consensus, implementation, and network results remain shared responsibilities.