BGP Role Model: Tracking the Adoption of RFC 9234
Cloudflare, Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Cloudflare measures RFC 9234 deployment and finds two Tier 1 networks unexpectedly stripping the Only to Customer attribute.
Cloudflare measured global adoption of RFC 9234, which lets routers reject BGP route leaks on their own using BGP Roles and the Only to Customer attribute.
Route leaks push traffic down paths it was never meant to take, misdirecting it through unintended networks, and Cloudflare has documented such incidents before.
BGP routing is driven by business relationships between networks, which RFC 9234 encodes explicitly so leaks can be detected automatically. The measurement identifies who has deployed the mechanism so far.
It also found two Tier 1 networks unexpectedly stripping the OTC attribute, which defeats the protection downstream.