BLACKHOLE Community
RFC 7999

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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)                           T. King
Request for Comments: 7999                                    C. Dietzel
Category: Informational                                           DE-CIX
ISSN: 2070-1721                                              J. Snijders
                                                                     NTT
                                                              G. Doering
                                                             SpaceNet AG
                                                              G. Hankins
                                                                   Nokia
                                                            October 2016

                          BLACKHOLE Community

Abstract

   This document describes the use of a well-known Border Gateway
   Protocol (BGP) community for destination-based blackholing in IP
   networks.  This well-known advisory transitive BGP community named
   "BLACKHOLE" allows an origin Autonomous System (AS) to specify that a
   neighboring network should discard any traffic destined towards the
   tagged IP prefix.

Status of This Memo

   This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
   published for informational purposes.

   This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
   (IETF).  It represents the consensus of the IETF community.  It has
   received public review and has been approved for publication by the
   Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG).  Not all documents
   approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
   Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.

   Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
   and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
   http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7999.

King, et al.                  Informational                     [Page 1]
RFC 7999                   BLACKHOLE Community              October 2016

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................3
      1.1. Requirements Language ......................................3
   2. BLACKHOLE Community .............................................4
   3. Operational Recommendations .....................................4
      3.1. IP Prefix Announcements with BLACKHOLE Community Attached ..4
      3.2. Local Scope of Blackholes ..................................4
      3.3. Accepting Blackholed IP Prefixes ...........................5
   4. Vendor Implementation Recommendations ...........................6
   5. IANA Considerations .............................................6
   6. Security Considerations .........................................6
   7. References ......................................................7
      7.1. Normative References .......................................7
      7.2. Informative References .....................................7
   Acknowledgements ...................................................8
   Authors' Addresses .................................................9

King, et al.                  Informational                     [Page 2]
RFC 7999                   BLACKHOLE Community              October 2016

1.  Introduction

   Network infrastructures have been increasingly hampered by DDoS
   attacks.  In order to dampen the effects of these DDoS attacks, IP
   networks have offered blackholing with BGP [RFC4271] using various
   mechanisms such as those described in [RFC3882] and [RFC5635].

   DDoS attacks targeting a certain IP address may cause congestion of
   links used to connect to adjacent networks.  In order to limit the
   impact of such a scenario on legitimate traffic, networks adopted a
   mechanism called "BGP blackholing".  A network that wants to trigger
   blackholing needs to understand the triggering mechanism adopted by
   its neighboring networks.  Different networks provide different
   mechanisms to trigger blackholing, including but not limited to pre-
   defined blackhole next-hop IP addresses, specific BGP communities, or
   out-of-band BGP sessions with a special BGP speaker.

   Having several different mechanisms to trigger blackholing in
   different networks makes it an unnecessarily complex, error-prone,