Add Support for RFC 9234 (BGP Roles and Only-To-Customer Attribute)

[tigermust]

Hello exabgp team,

I would like to kindly request consideration for implementing RFC 9234 - BGP Roles and the Only-To-Customer (OTC) path attribute in exabgp.
RFC 9234 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9234

It defines a simple and robust mechanism to prevent BGP route leaks by introducing:

• BGP Role capability, and
• the OTC attribute, which allows routers to automatically mark and validate route propagation based on the business relationship between BGP peers.

The RFC is relatively small, well-specified, and straightforward to implement in modern BGP daemons.

Why this matters

Support for RFC 9234 is increasingly important for improving global routing security and stability.

Several alternative BGP daemon implementations already support this RFC since 2022, including:

• BIRD
• FRR
• OpenBGPD

On the vendor side, major networking equipment platforms also support RFC 9234, such as Juniper, H3C, and others.

Furthermore some large Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), such as LINX, AMS-IX, MSK-IX and France-IX already support RFC 9234 to help mitigate route leaks.

This means exabgp is one of the few widely used open-source BGP daemons that currently lacks support this RFC9234. Implementing RFC 9234 in exabgp would help ensure compatibility and consistent behavior across multi-vendor and multi-software environments.

Request

Could you please consider adding support for RFC 9234 in exabgp?
Implementing BGP Roles and OTC in exabgp would significantly increase routing stability for operators using exabgp and contribute to a More Stable Internet!

Thank you for your time and for the great work on exabgp.

Best regards, Dmitriy

[thomas-mangin]

Hi Dmitriy, I may do. Thanks for pointing me to this RFC and asking. Thomas