BGP Vortex: Internet Kill Switch?
Find Threat Talks on
BGP Vortex: Internet Kill Switch?
BGP is designed to keep the internet connected by constantly recalculating routes between networks.
BGP Vortex flips that strength into a weakness. Instead of hijacking traffic or stealing data, it targets convergence itself – forcing routers to repeatedly withdraw and re-announce routes until the control plane never settles.
Endless updates. Constant recalculation. CPU exhaustion.
The research claims this oscillation could ripple across upstream providers and destabilize large parts of the internet’s routing fabric.
In reality, the outcome depends on policy choices, community handling, and operator controls that most networks don’t expose by default. Rob Maas (Field CTO, ON2IT) hosts Eric Nghia Nguyen Duy, Network Engineer at AMS-IX, for an episode of Threat Talks to break down how BGP Vortex is supposed to work, where the theory holds, and why real-world internet operators are far more resilient than the headlines suggest.
What you’ll learn:
How BGP actually behaves under sustained churn
What convergence means in practice – and what happens when it never completes.
• How the BGP Vortex mechanism is supposed to work
Route oscillation, update amplification, and why BGP communities are central to the idea.
• What makes this hard to exploit in the real world
Why upstream policy acceptance, configuration choices, and visibility matter more than the protocol itself.
• Where theory meets operational reality
How modern backbone routers, monitoring, and automation change the risk profile.
• What defenders should take away from this research
Configuration hygiene, policy inspection, and knowing where your trust boundaries actually sit.
Your cybersecurity experts
Eric Nghia Nguyen Duy
Network Engineer
AMS-IX
Rob Maas
Field CTO
ON2IT
Episode details
BGP is the protocol that allows thousands of independent networks to exchange reachability information and move traffic across the global internet. It was built to handle constant change – outages, re-routing, and shifting paths happen every day.
The BGP Vortex concept focuses on what happens when that change never stabilizes.
The research proposes that a malicious downstream network could manipulate route announcements and BGP community attributes in a way that causes upstream routers to repeatedly withdraw and re-advertise routes. In theory, this creates a feedback loop: updates trigger recalculations, recalculations trigger more updates, and the control plane is kept permanently busy.
In practice, this outcome depends on a narrow set of conditions.
Upstream providers must explicitly accept and honor specific community signals. Routing policies must allow oscillation to persist. And abnormal update patterns would need to go unnoticed – despite the fact that large operators actively monitor for exactly this kind of behavior.
As Eric Nghia Nguyen Duy explains, massive BGP update events are not unusual on the global internet. Operators have decades of experience handling them, supported by hardened configurations, policy controls, and increasingly automated responses.
This episode breaks down where the BGP Vortex idea is technically interesting, where it becomes operationally unlikely, and what network and security teams should actually focus on when assessing BGP-related risk.
Get your Hacker T-shirt
Join the treasure hunt!
Find the code within this episode and receive your own hacker t-shirt for free.
