BGP ORIGIN Attribute Manipulation and Its Impact on the Internet
Cloudflare, Friday, July 24th, 2026
Cloudflare research finds ~70% of BGP paths have ORIGIN attributes manipulated by transit providers.
Cloudflare research reveals that approximately 70% of observed BGP paths experience manipulation of the ORIGIN attribute by transit providers seeking routing advantages.
The study found major operators, including 26% of top-50 ASes, rewrite this mandatory routing attribute to IGP values to attract more traffic.
Given widespread non-compliance with RFC standards and the lack of legitimate technical reasons for ORIGIN rewriting, the researchers argue the attribute should be deprecated from BGP path selection.