On 11/13/24 9:39 AM, Brandon Z. wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Currently, due to political factors, some countries are not particularly proactive in deploying
> RPKI. Imagine if the RIR of a region were forced to revoke all IP resources of a particular country
> from RPKI, effectively isolating that country from the global internet.

Thanks for raising this topic. In all the rush to deploy RPKI I fear these issues are not talked
about enough.

> To address this, one approach is for autonomous networks within a region to establish two trusted
> RPKI CA servers: one from the major RIRs and another locally managed. The locally managed CA would
> take precedence, allowing autonomous networks to submit their IP resources to the RPKI server of
> their peers (and potentially backed by a national mandate to trust this CA). This setup could
> prevent a scenario where an entire country’s IP resources are revoked, leading to all IPs being
> marked as invalid.

A variant of this could make some sense, the issue is that it doesn't do you a whole lot of good to
have a local RPKI anchor that you and your local community look to if the global internet community
isn't looking at it - sure, your IPs are routable to a few of your friends, but they can't reach
Google...oops.

Another variant I've suggested before relies on timeouts for removal - for networks that have RPKI
anchors deployed, if their RIR wants to remove their anchors the RIR must publish an intent to
remove the anchor a week (or some other N) prior to the removal, with validators ignoring immediate
removal. This takes the issue from "I woke up one morning and my IPs weren't routable" to "I spent a
week arguing on *NOG and the internet community added a new temporary workaround to avoid my ISP
losing all its resources due to a runaway RIR".

> Another concept is to use blockchain technology. While cryptocurrencies use computational power to
> verify ownership, BGP could use peer count. If an IP resource is marked as valid by a majority of
> high-influence networks (with many peers), it could be trusted by the entire internet.

I see where you're going - blockchains are an audit log (eg Certificate Transparency) and
cryptocurrencies generally use something expensive to perform anti-sybil to gate appending to the
audit log, but allowing the largest ISPs to randomly assign or re-assign resources doesn't solve the
problem, it only makes it worse (and we can't do the thing cryptocurrencies do where resource
holders have keys which are required to move the resources, because its legitimate for a RIR to
reclaim resources for non-payment).

Having a cryptographic audit log of RPKI changes (published by the RIRs, presumably) isn't the worst
idea in the world, but it doesn't really buy us a lot so its just kinda added complexity.

Matt