In the world of IRR and RPKI, BGP route acceptance criteria is important to get right.

  DE-CIX has published a detailed flow chart documenting their acceptance criteria:  https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/frankfurt/route-server-guide

  But I don’t see a lot of operators publishing their criteria.  I imagine there is a some sort of coalescing industry standard out there, but so far I can’t find it.  Of the upstreams I use, just one publishes a flowchart.  Another is basically refusing to explain anything other than they “use” IRR and RPKI, ad that RPKI is “good”.

  I assumed that everyone implementing RPKI validation, would skip IRR route object validation if the route is RPKI-valid.  I assumed that everyone is doing this now, or would do this when they implement RPKI validation.  But I spoke to an operator today, which still expects all routes to pass IRR as well (and while they perform RPKI-validation, they effectively do nothing with the result).  To me, this seems like a different direction than most operators are going.  Or is it?

  The most surprising thing in the DE-DIX flow chart, was that they check that the origin AS exists in the IRR as-set, before doing RPKI, and if the set existence fails, they reject the route.  I don’t see a problem with this, as maintaining as-sets is easy, but it does prevent an eventual 100% RPKI future with no IRR at all.

  I also thought there may be an informational RFC on this, but I couldn’t find anything.  Has there been anything published or any presentations given, on generally accepted BGP route acceptance criteria?


Tom