Measuring Propagation Time of RPKI Validity Changes on the Dataplane#

Alexander Männel, TU Dresden

• Why: When you change a ROA — including an emergency change during a hijack — how long until actual dataplane reachability changes? This is the first Internet-wide answer, and the numbers should inform every operator's incident playbook.
• What: RPKI propagation is at least an order of magnitude slower than plain BGP: invalid-to-valid transitions take 9–12 minutes and valid-to-invalid transitions 30–42 minutes to take effect at 50% of vantage points. The public measurement platform ReRPKI lets operators observe how RIPE Atlas probes connected through their AS experience reachability during ROA changes.
• How: The method uses the CDN origin of the RIPE RRDP repository plus an optimized validator to detect ROA changes earlier than the ecosystem (at least 57 seconds faster, median 5:07 minutes before the fastest public validator, n=24,886), then triggers traceroutes from 300+ CAIDA Ark vantage points every three minutes for an hour, covering all RIPE prefixes in the RPKI hosted model.
• Where applicable: Internet-wide and vendor-neutral; the latencies reflect current relying-party fetch intervals and validator configurations, so they bound what any ROV deployment can expect today.