BGP route leak
A BGP route leak, as RFC 7908 defines it, is a route announcement that propagates beyond the scope its sender, receiver or an AS along the path intended, most often from an accidental misconfiguration rather than a deliberate attack. AdminKit's Whois/RDAP tool looks up the ASN and network operator behind a route, the relationships a leak crosses without authorization.
By AdminKit team, Netbase JSC · Updated
A BGP route leak is the propagation of a BGP announcement beyond the scope its sender, receiver, or an AS along the path intended, as RFC 7908 defines it — most commonly a network accidentally re-announcing routes learned from one provider to another, instead of keeping them local, in violation of ordinary routing policy. That distinguishes a leak from BGP hijacking: a hijack forges which network originates a route, while a leak propagates a genuine, correctly originated route to networks that were never supposed to see it, usually through a configuration mistake rather than malicious intent — which is also why Route Origin Validation under RFC 6811 cannot catch most leaks: it “only attempts to verify the origin” AS, not the path a leaked route traveled. RFC 7908 catalogs six distinct leak types, from a multihomed customer re-exposing one provider’s routes to another, to a route re-originated under a different AS path, several illustrated with real incidents that caused large-scale outages. ASPA validation, checking the authorized provider relationship between each AS pair in a path, is one of the few defenses that can catch a leak directly, since the leaked route’s origin AS is often still technically valid.