BEAR: BGP Event Analysis and Reporting

Abstract: The Internet comprises of interconnected, independently managed Autonomous Systems (AS) that rely on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for inter-domain routing. BGP anomalies--such as route leaks and hijacks--can divert traffic through unauthorized or inefficient paths, jeopardizing network reliability and security. Although existing rule-based and machine learning methods can detect these anomalies using structured metrics, they still require experts with in-depth BGP knowledge of, for example, AS relationships and historical incidents, to interpret events and propose remediation. In this paper, we introduce BEAR (BGP Event Analysis and Reporting), a novel framework that leverages LLMs to automatically generate comprehensive reports explaining detected BGP anomaly events. BEAR employs a multi-step reasoning process that translates tabular BGP data into detailed textual narratives, enhancing interpretability and analytical precision. To address the limited availability of publicly documented BGP anomalies, we also present a synthetic data generation framework powered by LLMs. Evaluations on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that BEAR achieves 100% accuracy, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and in-context learning baselines. This work pioneers an automated approach for explaining BGP anomaly events, offering valuable operational insights for network management.