BEAR: BGP Event Analysis and Reporting

Li, Hanqing, Fedeli, Melania, Kolar, Vinay, Klabjan, Diego

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

--The Internet comprises of interconnected, independently managed Autonomous Systems (AS) that rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for inter-domain routing. BGP anomalies--such as route leaks and hijacks--can divert traffic through unauthorized or inefficient paths, jeopardizing network reliability and security. Although existing rule-based and machine learning methods can detect these anomalies using structured metrics, they still require experts with in-depth BGP knowledge of, for example, AS relationships and historical incidents, to interpret events and propose remediation. In this paper, we introduce BEAR (BGP Event Analysis and Reporting), a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate comprehensive reports explaining detected BGP anomaly events. BEAR employs a multi-step reasoning process that translates tabular BGP data into detailed textual narratives, enhancing interpretability and analytical precision. T o address the limited availability of publicly documented BGP anomalies, we also present a synthetic data generation framework powered by LLMs. Evaluations on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that BEAR achieves 100% accuracy, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and in-context learning baselines. This work pioneers an automated approach for explaining BGP anomaly events, offering valuable operational insights for network management. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the principal inter-domain routing protocol that facilitates data exchange across the Internet by enabling autonomous systems (ASes) to disseminate network reachability information [1]. As the backbone of Internet connectivity, BGP's proper functioning is critical for maintaining global network stability and performance [2].