What is RPKI?
Several well-known internet service outages happened when one network announced addresses belonging to another. Pakistan Telecom accidentally announced addresses belonging to YouTube in 2008. People lost access to YouTube for around two hours and Pakistan Telecom was overwhelmed by traffic it did not expect to see.
- Misconfigurations and malice can result in one network announcing IP addresses belonging to another network. This can cause outages.
- RPKI is a technology for certifying which AS Numbers are allowed to announce a block of IP addresses.
- RPKI helps protect against misconfiguration at the moment. It is being developed to help protect against malicious attacks.
RPKI is the Resource Public Key Infrastructure. PKIs are a standard tool used for things like creating digital certificates for websites, email, and even identity cards. The RPKI provides a way to create these certificates for blocks of IP addresses and the AS Numbers that announce them to the internet.
Then, other networks can build filters based on these digital certificates, so they can reject announcements from the wrong network.
The technology is being developed to add more security. At the moment, RPKI can help protect against misconfiguration. In the future, it should help protect against malicious attacks.
Explore More Related to RPKI:
- Regional Internet Registries
- What is an ASN?
- What Are Legacy IPv4 Addresses?
- Address Blocks and CIDR