The Erik protocol: improving RPKI data fetch

The Erik protocol: improving RPKI data fetch

From PING by APNIC

June 10, 2026 · 38 min · Season 6 · Episode 11

About this episode

This episode discusses the Erik protocol designed to improve RPKI data fetching efficiency with insights from Job Snijders.

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…

People in this episode

Guest: Job Snijders

Topics covered

  • secure Internet Routing
  • RPKI
  • BGP
  • data distribution
  • protocol design
  • network efficiency

Keywords

  • Erik protocol
  • RPKI
  • BGP
  • data fetching
  • network protocols
  • IETF125
  • Job Snijders

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: APNIC, SIDROPS, RIPE, Dutch cloud community, data center association

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