CICI:UCSS: Understanding, Analyzing and Improving RPKI adoption to strengthen routing security

The Internet relies on inter-domain routing for transmitting information globally across independent networks spread out over the world. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)designed to enable that routing has a critical security vulnerability enabling eavesdropping, interception, espionage, and manipulation of Internet traffic. The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the most widely adopted security mechanism to verify routing data in BGP and limit the impact of attacks and misconfigurations.

Although RPKI was standardized in 2012, in 2024 about 50% of routed address space is still not in RPKI.

Understanding why RPKI adoption has stalled, from the organizational perspective, can contribute to ongoing policy and technical efforts worldwide to secure the core technologies underlying the Internet. To that end, this project focuses on analyzing (i) which stakeholders are lagging in implementing RPKI, (ii) what specific barriers to adoption those lagging networks face, and (iii) what approaches are most effective in promoting adoption more widely and helping overcome those barriers.

This research advances the knowledge of organizations’ RPKI adoption processes by combining quantitative and qualitative data collection efforts, to better understand how to protect the critical routing infrastructure, and where to target efforts for the most impactful outcomes.

This project creates a new dataset of RPKI adoption data with aggregated statistics by organization characteristics and develops a comprehensive socio-technical framework of the adoption process based on measurement results and operator interviews, providing deep insights into operators’ decision-making processes, institutional stances on RPKI, IP management workflows, and operational challenges. Finally, this work generates targeted recommendations to improve RPKI adoption with accompanying analysis of which would yield best results and how they could be most effectively combined to address the needs of different stakeholders.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.