Measuring the Impact of RPKI on the BGP Updates Volume

Samuele Quinzi , Cristel Pelsser and Giuseppe Di Battista

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This 2026 international journal article, by Samuele Quinzi and 2 coauthors, was published in Proceedings of the ACM on Networking. Topics covered include rpki, rpki data sources, bgp, and bgp updates.

Full author list: Samuele Quinzi, Cristel Pelsser, and Giuseppe Di Battista.

Abstract

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the primary defense against BGP route misorigination. It offers some barriers 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.

Publication Details

Publication Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
June 2026
Published In
Proceedings of the ACM on Networking
Volume & Issue
Vol. 4, No. CoNEXT2
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Location
New York, NY, USA
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1145/3808667

Suggested citation

Samuele Quinzi, Cristel Pelsser, and Giuseppe Di Battista. 2026. Measuring the Impact of RPKI on the BGP Updates Volume. In Proceedings of the ACM on Networking. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3808667

BibTeX Citation

@article{Quinzi2026,
	title        = {Measuring the Impact of {RPKI} on the {BGP} Updates Volume},
	author       = {Samuele Quinzi and Cristel Pelsser and Giuseppe Di Battista},
	year         = 2026,
	month        = jun,
	journal      = {Proceedings of the ACM on Networking},
	publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	address      = {New York, NY, USA},
	volume       = 4,
	number       = {CoNEXT2},
	articleno    = 19,
	numpages     = 24,
	doi          = {10.1145/3808667},
	issn         = {2834-5509},
	url          = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3808667},
	abstract     = {The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is the primary defense against BGP route misorigination. It offers some barriers 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.},
	groups       = {International Journals and Magazines},
	keywords     = {RPKI, RPKI Data Sources, BGP, BGP Updates}
}

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