Malformed packets associated with routing protocols can cause undesirable consequences if not detected and contained properly as close to the originator as possible. This issue magnifies in scope and complexity in a large-scale network, such as a public IP network. A malformed routing packet has the potential to impact thousands of customers as well as all the major Internet service providers (ISP) in a matter of seconds.

This paper discusses internally developed techniques that enable engineers to study the response in a lab environment and insure that these packets cause no disruption to network operations. These measures have been implemented for almost three years and during this time, no major outage has occurred due to malformed Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) or Intermediate-System to Intermediate-System (ISIS) packets in the Verizon public IP network.