Towards an RPKI-rich Internet (and the appropriate allocation of responsibility in the event an RIR RPKI CA outage)

Mon Oct 1 16:44:17 UTC 2018

John Curran wrote on 01/10/2018 00:21:
> There is likely some on the nanog mailing list who have a view on this 
> matter, so I pose the question of "who should be responsible" for 
> consequences of RPKI RIR CA failure to this list for further discussion.

other replies in this thread have assumed that RPKI CA failure modes are 
restricted to loss of availability, but there are others failure modes, 
for example:

- fraud: rogue CA employee / external threat actor signs ROAs illegitimately

- negligence: CA accidentally signs illegitimate ROAs due to e.g. 
software bug

- force majeure: e.g. court orders CA to sign prefix with AS0, 
complicated by NIR RPKI delegation in jurisdictions which may have 
difficult relations with other parts of the world.

These types of situations are well-trodden territory for other types of 
PKI CA, where users

Otherwise, as other people have pointed out, catastrophic systems 
failure at the CA is designed to be fail-safe.  I.e. if the CA goes 
away, ROAs will be evaluated as "unknown" and life will continue on.  If 
people misconfigure their networks and do silly things with this 
specific failure mode, that's their problem.  You can't stop people from 
aiming guns at their feet and pulling the trigger.

Nick