GHSA-frrj-87jh-2772: GoBGP confederation validation panics on empty AS_PATH attribute

Found through variant analysis based on CVE-2026-41643 Summary GoBGP accepts a zero-length AS_PATH during UPDATE decoding and later panics while validating that attribute for a confederation eBGP peer. The vulnerable path is in the BGP UPDATE validator: a malformed UPDATE that should be rejected as a malformed AS_PATH instead reaches an unchecked p.Value[0] access, allowing a configured confederation eBGP peer to trigger a denial of service. Affected - Project: gobgp - Repo: https://github.com/osrg/gobgp - Pinned ref: c24629411ba49f160d9dc09126f418218127e016 Root cause An established peer's receive path reads BGP bytes from the network connection in pkg/server/fsm.go:1267, parses UPDATE bodies through the BGP message decoder, and validates decoded UPDATEs with peer state at pkg/server/fsm.go:1849. The UPDATE decoder walks the path-attribute list in pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:15773 and selects the concrete attribute parser from the attacker-controlled attribute type at pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:15855. For AS_PATH, PathAttributeAsPath.DecodeFromBytes returns nil when the decoded attribute length is zero (pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:11533, pkg/packet/bgp/bgp.go:11538), leaving p.Value empty rather than reporting a malformed attribute. Validation then dispatches each decoded attribute through ValidateAttribute (pkg/packet/bgp/validate.go:34); in the confederation eBGP branch, pkg/packet/bgp/validate.go:162 indexes p.Value[0] before checking that any AS_PATH segment was decoded. The eBGP and confederation guards are normal peer-state gates: pkg/config/oc/util.go:127 defines eBGP as peer AS differing from local AS, pkg/config/oc/util.go:116 checks confederation membership, and pkg/server/fsm.go:740 and pkg/server/fsm.go:741 copy those results into the FSM state used by the validator. Reproduction INT-bgp-gobgp-confed-empty-aspath-panic.zip bash ./poc/run.sh TRIGGERED: confed empty AS_PATH validation panic: runtime error: index out of range The TRIGGERED line is the recovered pan