The Erik protocol: improving RPKI data fetch

In this episode of PING we’re hearing about secure Internet Routing and its data distribution problem from Job Snijders who has been on PING before talking about his measurements in BGP and RPKI. We caught up at IETF125 in Shenzhen where Job presented to the SIDROPS working group on a new protocol he’s been designing, called Erik. The Erik protocol was named in honour of Erik Bais who died in May 2024. Erik was a stalwart of the RIPE routing community. He was a chair of the Address policy working group, and active in the Dutch cloud community and the data center association. RPKI, the principal mechanism for determining secure inter domain routing intent (hence SIDR) depends on every relying party (or RP) validating the data collecting all the signed statements from all the publication points, worldwide. This is a time consuming process which inherently serialises behind the sequence of bytes fetched to form a given repository state at a publication point, and how the protocol works out whats changed since the last fetch by this user, and what to send. It’s not very efficient and it’s not scaling as well as we’d like as the amount of data rises, and the number of validators or RPs are fetching the data. 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 synchronisation, 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.