Towards a Rigorous Methodology for Measuring Adoption of RPKI Route Validation and Filtering
This addresses the challenge of accurately assessing ROV adoption for network operators and security researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing standardization efforts.
The paper tackles the problem of measuring adoption of Route Origin Validation (ROV) for routing security, arguing that current uncontrolled experiments are insufficient and proposing a controlled methodology, with confirmation from three ASes implementing ROV.
A proposal to improve routing security---Route Origin Authorization (ROA)---has been standardized. A ROA specifies which network is allowed to announce a set of Internet destinations. While some networks now specify ROAs, little is known about whether other networks check routes they receive against these ROAs, a process known as Route Origin Validation (ROV). Which networks blindly accept invalid routes? Which reject them outright? Which de-preference them if alternatives exist? Recent analysis attempts to use uncontrolled experiments to characterize ROV adoption by comparing valid routes and invalid routes. However, we argue that gaining a solid understanding of ROV adoption is impossible using currently available data sets and techniques. Our measurements suggest that, although some ISPs are not observed using invalid routes in uncontrolled experiments, they are actually using different routes for (non-security) traffic engineering purposes, without performing ROV. We conclude with a description of a controlled, verifiable methodology for measuring ROV and present three ASes that do implement ROV, confirmed by operators.