Hacker News revisits Internet routing security with Is BGP safe yet?
Original: Is BGP safe yet? View original →
The Hacker News post "Is BGP safe yet?" is not about a new launch. It is a return to one of the Internet’s most stubborn infrastructure questions: how secure the Border Gateway Protocol really is today. Cloudflare’s tracker answers the question immediately with a plain "No." The page describes BGP as the routing system that decides which paths traffic should take, while also reminding readers that route leaks and hijacks can still cause major disruption because security is not built into the protocol by default.
What makes the page useful is that it tracks concrete progress instead of stopping at the warning. The proposed mitigation is RPKI origin validation, and the update list shows real deployment movement: Sparkle (AS6762) added rejection of RPKI-invalid prefixes on February 3, 2026, while prior entries include Bell Canada, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, Microsoft, AWS, Comcast, and other large networks. The overall answer is still "No," but the operational picture is clearly better than it was a few years ago.
- The site explains its test in practical terms: it announces a legitimate route while making the announcement intentionally invalid.
- If an ISP still accepts that route, the user can load the test page, which suggests the ISP may also accept leaked or hijacked routes.
- The gap between partial deployment and universal deployment is the real reason the headline answer has not changed.
The Hacker News discussion matters because it pulls routing security back into focus at a time when attention is concentrated on AI applications and developer tooling. Cloud infrastructure, model APIs, and real-time AI services all depend on underlying routing reliability. In that sense, BGP safety is not legacy plumbing. It is part of the modern software stack’s trust boundary.
References: Cloudflare’s tracker and the Hacker News thread.
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