Goals

• Be as secure as possible. Code carefully, do strict validity checks especially in the network input path, and use bounded buffer operations. Use privilege separation to mitigate the effects of possible security bugs.
• Reliability is extremely important, as bgpd exiting usually means losing all routes and thus reachability.
• Provide a lean implementation, sufficient for a majority. Don't try to support each and every obscure usage case, but cover the typical ones.
• Provide a powerful and easy to understand configuration language.
• Be very fast, and very memory efficient. As bgpd carries tables with hundreds of thousands of entries, these have to be designed carefully with regard to their memory requirements.