ImpROV: Measurement and Practical Mitigation of Collateral Damage in RPKI Route Origin Validation

Weitong Li, Yuze Li, Taejoong Chung

34th USENIX Security Symposium · Day 1

The internet's foundational routing protocol, the **Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)**, was not designed with robust security in mind, leaving it vulnerable to various attacks, most notably **prefix hijacking**. To combat these vulnerabilities, the **Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)** was introduced, providing a cryptographic framework to authenticate the origin of IP prefix announcements. A key component of RPKI is **Route Origin Validation (ROV)**, where routers validate incoming BGP announcements against authorized RPKI records to filter out invalid routes. While ROV significantly enhances routing security, its partial deployment across the internet has introduced a complex side effect known as **collateral damage**. This phenomenon occurs when an **Autonomous System (AS)** that performs ROV inadvertently directs traffic to an incorrect origin if subsequent hops in the path fail to perform proper validation, essentially undermining the security benefits of ROV for the validating AS.

AI review

Solid, rigorous measurement work that quantifies a real gap in RPKI deployment — collateral damage from partial ROV adoption — and delivers a practical, minimal-overhead fix. The 85.6% vulnerability figure and the 34% of ROV ASes still exposed are the numbers defenders need to internalize. Not revolutionary, but the kind of methodical infrastructure security research that actually moves the needle.