[Podcast] The Erik protocol: Improving RPKI data fetch

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In this episode of PING, we talk with Job Snijders about secure Internet routing and the challenges of distributing its data. Job previously joined PING to discuss his work measuring BGP and RPKI.

We caught up at IETF125 in Shenzhen, where Job presented to the SIDROPS Working Group on a new protocol he has been developing called Erik. The protocol is named in honour of Erik Bais, who passed away in May 2024. Erik was a respected member of the RIPE routing community, serving as chair of the Address Policy Working Group and contributing actively to the Dutch cloud community and the data centre association.

RPKI, the main mechanism for establishing secure interdomain routing intent (hence SIDR), relies on every relying party (RP) to validate data by collecting all signed statements from publication points around the world. This process is time-consuming. It inherently serializes data retrieval based on the sequence of bytes needed to reconstruct a repository's state at each publication point. The protocol must also allow the client and server to determine what has changed since the RP's last fetch and decide what data to send in response. As a result, the system is not very efficient. It does not scale as well as we'd like, especially as both the volume of data and the number of validating RPs continue to grow.

Job's Erik protocol is designed to improve significantly on the two mechanisms defined at present, the RSYNC protocol, originally designed in the mid-1990s for filesystem synchronization, and RRDP, a SIDR-specific delta protocol which was designed to improve on rsync, using experience gained from the NRTM mechanism used to copy data in the RIR Whois databases.

Job has been able to find why RPKI fetch is slow, and design a protocol using the Merkle Tree mechanism, which can significantly improve the collection delay, as well as allow for intermediaries such as CDN providers to host services in the cloud.

Read more about the Erik protocol on Job's website and the IETF website:

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