SoK: An Introspective Analysis of RPKI Security

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the main mechanism to protect inter-domain routing with BGP from prefix hijacks. It has already been widely deployed by large providers and the adoption rate is getting to a critical point. Almost half of all the global prefixes are now covered by RPKI and measurements show that 27% of networks are already using RPKI to validate BGP announcements. Over the past 10 years, there has been much research effort in RPKI, analyzing different facets of the protocol, such as software vulnerabilities, robustness of the infrastructure or the proliferation of RPKI validation. In this work we compile the first systemic overview of the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in RPKI and quantify the security landscape of the global RPKI deployments based on our measurements and analysis. Our study discovers that 56% of the global RPKI validators suffer from at least one documented vulnerability. We also do a systematization of knowledge for existing RPKI security research and complement the existing knowledge with novel measurements in which we discover new trends in availability of RPKI repositories, and their communication patterns with the RPKI validators. We weave together the results of existing research and our study, to provide a comprehensive tableau of vulnerabilities, their sources, and to derive future research paths necessary to prepare RPKI for full global deployment.