In general, I'm opposed to rushing into adding support for experimental technologies in things like dashboards, as it can overcomplicate matters and make people wary of giving things a try. 

I have recently taken the time to understand BGPsec, and cleared up a number of misconceptions I had around how it operates -- it's actually what most people assume RPKI OV is doing. The barrier to entry is literally just publishing public keys of the routers signing the messages, and ensuring they are made available to routers (ok, BGP daemons) to do the checking.

To me, there's two main issues with BGPsec, and that is the memory requirement of storing all the published keys, and the CPU impact of signing and/or verifying so many things. These are things that may be addressed over time with the natural progression of route processors becoming more capable (time to retire that Cyrix 200 yet?) and utilising BGPsec only on "sensitive" peers, such as at IXP route servers and with customers etc.

What is abundantly clear, however, is that BGPsec will not gain any traction at all unless it is easy to try. Operating a delegated RPKI repo is sufficiently complex that most can't be bothered. That is why RPKI OV has seen the uptake it has -- there is an easier route: use the hosted repo. 

Considering the only thing the RPKI repo needs to support BGPsec is the router signing keys, with no risk of affecting existing ROAs etc, it seems like minimal effort to add the ability to upload keys through the dashboard. Enabling BGPsec validation on a router to try it out is then even less effort than what is required to support RPKI RTR and OV that many networks have ended up doing over the past couple of years.

In my opinion, the low level of effort required to support uploading of keys to a hosted repo is more than repaid by the potential boost to support BGPsec would receive, even if BGPsec would be radically changed in the intervening time, the publication of signing keys is highly unlikely to change.

Is this an action RIPE NCC *needs* to take? Of course not. I think it's well within the remit though, has precedent with the whole whois/RDAP story, does not open any "slippery slope" arguments because it's such a minor change with clear benefit, and will need to be done anyway should BGPsec gain widespread traction... As Job says, it's best to identify problems now, while it's early. It lowers the barrier to entry, which should encourage the authors of BGP daemons to support validation, and maybe even support signing themselves. There is no appreciable downside here.

I would like to see router signing key publishing support in the RPKI dashboard.

Matthew Walster

(Now you see why I'm called waffle...)