Internet2’s Steven Wallace Presents ARIN 52 Keynote: RPKI-ROA Diffusion in Research and Education

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Steven Wallace, director of routing integrity at Internet2, recently delivered the keynote address at ARIN 52 on the Challenges of RPKI-ROA Diffusion Within the U.S. Research and Education Community.

Wallace has often referred to RPKI Route Origin Authorizations (RPKI-ROAs) as the “routing security easy button.” While there’s been some improvement in the adoption of RPKI-ROA among the U.S. R&E community, it still lags far behind the global internet. Specifically, only 15-18% of prefixes in U.S. R&E networks are covered by RPKI-ROAs, compared to 46% in the global internet.

Closer Look at the Barriers

Wallace highlighted several challenges affecting the U.S. R&E community’s adoption of RPKI-ROA, including the sheer number of legacy resources in the U.S. that currently lack an ARIN agreement and therefore cannot utilize ARIN services like RPKI until they complete the agreement process. Other challenges affecting progress in this space include the need for more awareness among community leadership, the absence of a routing security champion in many organizations, and a lack of urgency until a routing security incident occurs. He also mentioned how RPKI Route Origin Validation (RPKI-ROV), which is executed using RPKI-ROA, transfers the technical burden of routing security controls from internet service providers to IP address holders; that burden can unduly impact smaller and lesser-resourced institutions.

Internet2’s approach to improving RPKI-ROA adoption under its Routing Integrity Initiative has centered around outreach to raise awareness; education to answer common questions and provide ‘how to’ guidance; support through webinars, office hours, and RPKI-ROAthons; resources like the Internet2 Route Reports and Routing Integrity Assessments; and collaboration with ARIN to address friction points and streamline the agreement process.

The results of these efforts within the U.S. R&E community are worth celebrating. Since the start of 2023, 155 organizations across the community have taken action to establish ARIN agreements – and, as a result, now have access to routing security protections through ARIN’s services. Wallace also has seen an increase in RPKI-ROA coverage: “When I first started looking at this [around 2020], ROA coverage was about 4%. Now it’s about 15-18%.”

Watch the Keynote Recording