In this episode, Job Snijders discusses RPKIViews, his long-term project to collect the ‘views’ of cryptographically secured routing assertions every day and maintain an archive of the BGP-related route validation states. The project is named to reflect RouteViews, the long-standing archive of BGP state maintained by the University of Oregon, which has been previously discussed on PING.
Job is based in the Netherlands, and has worked in BGP routing for large international ISPs and content distribution networks as well as being a board member of the RIPE NCC. He is known for his work producing the open source RPKI validator rpki-client, which is implemented in C and distributed widely through the OpenBSD project.
RPKI is a system designed for Internet number resources (IPv4, IPv6, and ASNs) used in global Internet routing. It provides cryptographic proof of resource delegation and enables delegates to sign their intentions for originating specific prefixes in BGP, as well as define the relationships between ASNs that exchange BGP routes.
Why RPKIViews? Job explains that there’s a necessary conversation between people involved in the operational deployment of secure BGP, and the standards development and research community: How many of the world’s BGP routes are being protected? How many entities are producing Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), the primary cryptographic objects used to perform Route Origin Validation (ROV) and how many ROAs are being created? What is the error rate in their production? What is the rate of growth? These and many other introspective ‘meta’ questions must be addressed when deploying such a system at scale. One of the best tools for this is a frequently updated archive of system states and route views, collected from diverse locations worldwide, to analyse and understand the system’s dynamics effectively.
Job is using the archive to produce his annual ‘RPKI year in review‘ report, which was published this year on the APNIC Blog (it’s posted to operations, research and standards development mailing lists and presented at conferences and meetings normally) and products are being used by the BGPAlerter service developed by Massimo Candela.
Read about more the RPKIViews archive on the APNIC Blog, and on the web:
- RPKI’s 2024 Year in review (Job Snijders, APNIC Blog, January 2025)
- RPKIViews (the RPKI views Web archive)
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