Introduction

Welcome to the documentation of the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). These pages offer a broad overview of the RPKI and how it can help make Internet routing using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) more secure. This way, you will learn how RPKI can benefit your organisation, as well as helping others to be more secure on the Internet.

About this Documentation

This documentation is continuously written, corrected and edited by the RPKI team at NLnet Labs. An initial version was written by Alex Band, Tim Bruijnzeels and Martin Hoffmann. Over time, additions from the network operator community, researchers and interested parties around the world were contributed. The documentation is edited via text files in the reStructuredText markup language and then compiled into a static website/offline document using the open source Sphinx and ReadTheDocs tools.

Note

You can contribute to the RPKI documentation by opening an issue or sending patches via pull requests on the GitHub source repository.

All the contents are under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY 3.0) license, with attribution to “The RPKI team at NLnet Labs and the RPKI community”.

About Resource Public Key Infrastructure

RPKI allows holders of Internet number resources to make verifiable statements about how they intend to use their resources. To achieve this, it uses a public key infrastructure that creates a chain of resource certificates that follows the same structure as the way IP addresses and AS numbers are handed down.

RPKI is used to make Internet routing more secure. It is a community-driven system in which open source software developers, router vendors and all five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) participate, i.e. ARIN, APNIC, AFRINIC, LACNIC and RIPE NCC.

Currently, RPKI is used to let the legitimate holder of a block of IP addresses make an authoritative statement about which AS is authorised to originate their prefix in the BGP. In turn, other network operators can download and validate these statements and make routing decisions based on them. This process is referred to as route origin validation (ROV). This provides a stepping stone to provide path validation in the future.

Organisation of this Documentation

This documentation is organised into three main sections:

  • The General section contains this introduction as well as information about the licensing, authors, etc. It also contains the FAQ and the Quick Help.

  • The RPKI Technology section explains the RPKI technology and standards in order for you to get a good sense of the requirements and moving parts. It will help you choose the right RPKI solution for your organisation, with regards to generating, publishing and using RPKI data.

  • The Operations section is about various open source projects that are maintained to support RPKI, as well as router support and external resources.