Learning to Identify Conflicts in RPKI

The long history of misconfigurations and errors in RPKI indicates that they cannot be easily avoided and will most probably persist also in the future. These errors create conflicts between BGP announcements and their covering ROAs, causing the RPKI validation to result in status invalid. Networks that enforce RPKI filtering with Route Origin Validation (ROV) would block such conflicting BGP announcements and as a result lose traffic from the corresponding origins. Since the business incentives of networks are tightly coupled with the traffic they relay, filtering legitimate traffic leads to a loss of revenue, reducing the motivation to filter invalid announcements with ROV. In this work, we introduce a new mechanism, LOV, designed for whitelisting benign conflicts on an Internet scale. The resulting whitelist is made available to RPKI supporting ASes to avoid filtering RPKI-invalid but benign routes. Saving legitimate traffic resolves one main obstacle towards RPKI deployment. We measure live BGP updates using LOV during a period of half a year and whitelist 52,846 routes with benign origin errors.