RPKI Not Harmful to BGP Stability, 11-Year Study Finds

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the system that figures out how data packets travel between the thousands of independent networks that make up the internet, has always been vulnerable to route hijacks. A network can accidentally or maliciously announce that it owns an IP address range it does not, drawing traffic away from its rightful destination. To combat this, the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) was introduced. It lets network operators cryptographically sign records that state which Autonomous Systems (ASes), the large network entities assigned unique numbers, are authorized to originate specific IP prefixes. When routers perform Route Origin Validation (ROV), they check these digital signatures and reject unauthorized announcements. This has made RPKI the internet’s primary defence against route leaks and hijacking.

Yet as RPKI deployment has grown, so has a nagging worry: could the system itself become a source of instability? Every time a Route Origin Authorization (ROA), the record that ties an IP prefix to an AS, is created, modified, or expires, routers that validate routes may need to recompute their forwarding tables. These recomputations can ripple through BGP, triggering a flurry of BGP update messages. If those updates become too frequent, they could degrade global routing performance. A new study by researcher Samuele Quinzi directly addresses this concern, using more than eleven years of operational data to measure just how much BGP activity can be attributed to RPKI changes.

The growth of the RPKI ecosystem is undeniable. Figure 1 in the study, based on the RIPE RPKI Archive from 2014 to 2025, shows a steep rise in ROA additions, expirations, and revocations for both IPv4 and IPv6. Regulatory pressures and industry best-practice recommendations are driving more network operators to protect their address space with ROAs. The implication is clear: if every RPKI change triggers routing updates, then the volume of that extra activity must also be climbing. The study’s goal was to find out whether this BGP chatter has become operationally significant or remains negligible.

Measuring that impact is technically demanding. A ROA appearing or disappearing does not automatically alter routing; what matters is whether the set of validated authorizations (VRPs, or Validated ROA Payloads) that a router sees actually changes. The researchers call these moments “RPKI events.” Identifying them required building an 11-year “time machine” from historical data. They used two complementary sources: the RIPE RPKI Archive, which holds daily snapshots stretching back to the early days of deployment, and RPKI-Flutter, a more recent platform that captures RPKI events with high frequency from multiple geographically distributed validators starting in 2024. Because the Archive records snapshots and not events directly, the team reconstructed events from it and validated that reconstruction against the finer-grained Flutter data for the overlap period. The comparison (Figure 2) showed remarkably similar BGP update volumes, confirming that the Archive-based methodology gives a reliable long-term estimate.

After matching each RPKI event to the BGP updates during its convergence window, and deliberately choosing a conservative, wide window that might overestimate the effect, the researchers compared the total number of RPKI-linked updates to the overall volume of BGP updates seen on the internet. The result is summarized in Figure 3: while the fraction of BGP updates associated with RPKI is clearly trending upward, it remains extremely small. Even with an approach that is designed to overcount, the contribution stays well below 1% of all BGP update traffic. In absolute terms, RPKI is not a harmful source of routing noise.

The findings are reassuring for network operators. The study provides strong evidence that RPKI’s security benefits, blocking route hijacks and misconfigurations, come at a negligible cost to routing stability. Operators should not hesitate to deploy RPKI and turn on ROV out of fear of creating excessive BGP churn. However, the upward trend cannot be ignored. As more address space becomes protected and more networks validate routes, the operational impact may evolve. The authors stress that continued monitoring remains important, but after eleven years of measurement, the conclusion is clear: RPKI delivers robust route protection with remarkably little side-effect on the global routing system.

For IT teams managing network infrastructure, implementing RPKI-based route validation is a proven way to stop traffic hijacking, and services like AEU‑I can assist with secure infrastructure planning that incorporates such best practices.