Patent ID: 7930424

Claim:
A method of detecting an invalid border gateway protocol (BGP) route in a plurality of BGP routes linking autonomous systems (ASs) of a network, wherein network traffic is routed based at least on BGP announcements from one or more BGP routers propagating in the plurality of BGP routes, the method comprising: obtaining a plurality of routing information objects from the BGP announcements; identifying a transient routing information object having an up time less than a first pre-determined threshold, wherein the transient routing information object represents a prefix and an AS path of the prefix; defining a valid routing information object set by selectively eliminating the transient routing information object from the plurality of routing information objects, and detecting a BGP route, in the plurality of BGP routes and from the BGP announcements, as invalid based on the valid routing information object set, wherein selectively eliminating the transient routing information object comprises: preventing the transient routing information object from being eliminated when the AS path is identified as an extension of a valid AS path, and wherein the one or more BGP routers comprise hardware.