Cloudflare 20260603 Enforcing the First AS in BGP AS_PATHs Summary
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What happened
Cloudflare’s official blog published Enforcing the First AS in BGP AS_PATHs, a June 3, 2026 engineering post about a deceptively small BGP validation rule that blocks a class of forged-path route hijacks.
The post starts from recent hijack attempts in which an attacker appeared to use unused autonomous system numbers and forged AS_PATH values. In BGP, a route announcement carries an ordered list of autonomous systems that the route has traversed. That list influences path selection, supports loop prevention, and helps operators reason about where traffic will go. But BGP still inherits a trust model in which the path attribute can be manipulated unless neighbors enforce basic consistency checks.