With Or Without RPKI: Measuring the Impact of RPKI on the BGP Updates Volume

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the primary defense against BGP route misorigination.
It offers a shield against origin hijacks, flavors of route leaks, and misconfigurations.
Since its deployment in 2011, the adoption of RPKI by Internet Service Providers has shown continuous growth, a trend that persists to this day.

As this growth continues it is important to measure its effect on BGP stability.

BGP is a chatty protocol with many updates that can result from a single configuration change on one router.

For instance, the addition of a new Route Origin Authorization in the RPKI may result in a change in the validity of a route advertised in BGP, and consequently in different routing decisions that are then propagated in BGP.

Here we aim to estimate the volume of updates observed in BGP upon such changes. We identify events resulting from ROA changes and estimate the amount of BGP updates observed in a public BGP repository during these events.

We observe that as RPKI adoption rises, the volume of updates generated by RPKI-related changes grows at a similar rate.

This growth also mirrors the expansion of the routing table, increasing as more address space is announced and protected by RPKI. However, we also have good news: despite this growth, RPKI-induced updates remain only a very small fraction, corresponding to less than 1% of the total volume of updates.