Visualizing The Benefits Of Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Over the last several weeks, some of the most prominent digital companies like Google, Cloudflare, Amazon and most recently Apple experienced issues with the services they are offering. While the types of services each of these companies differ, the common thread between these incidents was that they were a direct result of problems with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-the protocol that more than any other technology makes the Internet a reality. Of course the other commonality across these incidents was that they were quite costly for the affected companies and their users.

BGP events such as these are meticulously investigated and reported at least internally by each organization, and in some cases quite publicly. However, in the aftermath of all the analysis and hand-wringing about the vulnerable state of the Internet, not much ever seems to happen in the big picture to prevent further routing problems from recurring. That is the situation we find ourselves, decades after BGP's inception.

Now, it's not that there are no norms or built-in mechanisms for doing and making BGP right on the Internet. Over the years, methods such as maximum prefix limits, Internet Route Registry (IRR) based filtering and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have been defined and implemented. For more information on some of these methods, check out our earlier post on Best Practices to Combat Route Leaks and Hijacks.

Yet all of these best practice methods suffer from the same fundamental limitation-there's no way to make these practices binding on all the networks that make up the Internet. The only way that best practices grow on the Internet is through social promotion and business pressure.

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