MESSI: Behavioral Testing of BGP Implementations

Explore an innovative approach to automatically generate tests for Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) implementations in this 18-minute conference talk from NSDI '24. Discover MESSI (Modular Exploration of State and Structure Inclusively), a tool designed to address the challenges of testing complex, stateful network protocols. Learn how the researchers leveraged an executable BGP model to create approximately 150,000 behavioral tests, covering aspects such as route-map filtering, decision processes, route aggregation, and dynamics. Gain insights into the 22 correctness bugs identified across popular open-source BGP implementations and one closed-source implementation. Understand the potential of this model-based testing approach for improving the reliability of BGP and its adaptability to other stateful protocols with complex structures.