For ISPs, IXPs, and network operators across Asia-Pacific who need routing security deployed properly, not just signed off on paper.

Routing Security

Routing security planned, prepared, implemented, and maintained, with your team able to run it without me

Not signed ROAs that never get enforced. Not a deployment that risks breaking your own routes. Not a consultant who leaves before your team can operate it independently. BGP was built for a cooperative network of known peers; the internet that exists today is neither, and RPKI is the cryptographic layer that closes the gap.

30+ Years in internet infrastructure
23 Economies worked in, in person
2,000+ Network engineers trained across Asia-Pacific
Sound Familiar?

BGP routes traffic on trust, and trust is exploitable

The Border Gateway Protocol was designed in 1989 for a network of cooperative, mutually trusting peers. It has no built-in mechanism to verify that the AS announcing a prefix is actually authorised to do so. That gap is the attack surface: hijacks redirect traffic through adversary-controlled infrastructure, and route leaks can propagate a misconfiguration globally in under five minutes. Neither requires any access to your systems, only the ability to send BGP UPDATE messages.

The internet routes traffic based on assertions. RPKI turns assertions into cryptographic commitments. The technology is mature. The gap is deployment, not readiness.

Terry Sweetser, IEISI
Common pattern

Your prefix can be announced by anyone, and BGP won't stop it

Without RPKI ROV enforcement at upstream and peer routers, an AS announcing a prefix it doesn't own propagates globally. Traffic destined for your infrastructure, including customer data, authentication flows, and DNS queries, can be redirected to an attacker-controlled network.

Common pattern

A misconfiguration your NOC won't notice for hours

A route leak occurs when an AS re-announces routes it should not propagate, typically customer routes re-advertised to other providers, creating unintended transit paths. It doesn't require malicious intent: a misconfigured policy on a routine change can affect millions of end-users before the first alert fires.

Common pattern

Your routing posture is your customers' security posture

An ISP or IXP that accepts RPKI Invalid routes is one hop away from becoming unwitting transit for hijacked traffic. Your customers trust you to route their traffic only across paths with verifiable authorisation.

Common pattern

A board that hasn't asked the question yet

CISA, NIST, and the major RIRs (APNIC, ARIN, RIPE NCC) have all published routing security guidance that treats RPKI deployment as a baseline expectation. Boards and executives who haven't reviewed their organisation's RPKI status are carrying risk they may not have formally quantified.

The Alternatives

What else is on the table

Most operators weighing a routing security engagement are comparing it against one of these.

Alternative

Do nothing and defer

Reasonable if you genuinely haven't assessed the risk yet. Once a board or a customer asks the question, "we haven't looked into it" is a harder position to defend than a considered decision to wait, and the deployment doesn't get easier by delaying it.

Alternative

DIY through your RIR's self-service tools

Genuinely workable for straightforward ROA signing on a small, stable prefix set. The sequencing risk (max-length policy, signing before enforcing, validating coverage) is exactly where first-time deployments go wrong, and getting it wrong can break your own reachability.

Alternative

A large security or network consultancy

Strong for a broad security review with heavy resourcing behind it. Routing security is a narrow, operational specialisation within that scope, and it's common for RPKI to end up as a paragraph in a larger report rather than an implemented, enforced deployment.

Alternative

Wait for it to become automatic

RIR and vendor tooling keeps improving, and some of this genuinely gets easier over time. Enforcement still requires a deliberate decision on your network, and the deployment gap described above is a decision gap, not a tooling gap.

From ROA signing through to board-level governance: the full routing security stack

Routing security is not a single configuration change. It is a programme spanning registry hygiene, router policy, operational training, and governance. The sequencing matters: signing ROAs without enforcing ROV leaves your customers exposed to others' invalid routes; enforcing ROV without correct ROAs risks disrupting your own reachability. I have worked through this sequence across ISPs and carriers in Asia-Pacific and know where the operational surprises are.

A clear, risk-ordered fix list

Structured audit of your current posture: ROA coverage against announced prefixes, ROV status on peering and transit sessions, IRR record accuracy, and RIR registry hygiene. Produces a gap analysis and sequenced implementation plan, starting with the fixes that carry the highest risk if left unaddressed.

Prefixes signed correctly the first time

End-to-end Route Origin Authorisation signing for your APNIC, ARIN, RIPE NCC, or LACNIC allocated address space, covering both IPv4 and IPv6 prefix allocations. Covers max-length policy (a critical decision with operational consequences), ROA strategy for sub-delegation, and IRR cleanup that should accompany any ROA programme. Vendor-neutral across all RIR RPKI portals and hosted RPKI services. If you are also planning an IPv6 deployment →, ROA signing for your IPv6 space is part of that scope.

RPKI as active protection, not a passive registry

Router policy design and configuration to drop or deprioritise RPKI Invalid prefixes. Covers session-level policy, handling of NotFound prefixes, and the operational monitoring required to catch ROV-induced reachability issues before customers do. Supported on Cisco IOS/IOS-XR, Juniper Junos, MikroTik, BIRD, and FRRouting.

A network ready for path validation

Autonomous System Provider Authorization is the next generation of BGP security, extending RPKI from origin validation to path validation and enabling detection of route leaks that ROAs alone cannot prevent. ASPA is in active IETF standardisation and early deployment. Advisory on ASPA object creation, provider relationship documentation, and readiness for networks preparing to deploy as standards finalise.

A team that can run this without you

Practical routing security workshops for NOC and network engineering teams: RPKI architecture, ROA management workflows, ROV troubleshooting, IRR hygiene, and BGP security incident response. Designed for operators who maintain these systems in production, not for engineers sitting a certification exam. Delivered in-person across Asia-Pacific or remotely. See Training & Capacity Development → for the full training program.

Policy documents that survive an audit

Routing security policy documentation, board-level risk framing, and governance framework alignment (MANRS, NIST CSF, ISO 27001 Annex A). For management and boards who need to understand their organisation's routing security posture as part of broader cyber risk governance.

Where to Start

An RPKI Readiness Assessment

A structured audit of your current posture: ROA coverage against announced prefixes, ROV status on peering and transit sessions, IRR record accuracy, and RIR registry hygiene. You come out of it with a gap analysis and a sequenced implementation plan, whether or not you engage further.

RPKI Readiness Assessment

A risk-ordered gap analysis and sequenced implementation plan you can act on immediately, in-house or with further support.

What typically follows: ROA implementation, ROV enforcement, ASPA preparation, operator training, and policy and governance work, scoped once the assessment findings are in hand.

Audience

Routing security is not only a NOC problem, it is a board problem

Good cybersecurity is layered. At the network layer, that means RPKI. But the decision to deploy, and the accountability when it hasn't been, belongs at every level of an organisation: from the engineer handling ROA max-length policy to the board member approving the cyber risk register.

Boards routinely ask about ransomware preparedness and data breach liability. They should also be asking: does our AS have ROAs signed? Are we enforcing ROV? The answers to those questions are a direct statement about whether we protect our customers' traffic.

Terry Sweetser, IEISI
NOC & Network Operations

Operational implementation: where routing security lives or dies

ROA signing, ROV enforcement, RPKI cache configuration, BGP policy maintenance, and incident response. Routing security is operational technology: it requires the same change management rigour, monitoring, and runbook depth as any other production change. Training and implementation support for the teams who will own this day to day.

Management & C-Suite

Business risk framing: quantifying what "not deployed" actually means

Routing incidents have caused outages at financial institutions, redirected customer authentication traffic, and generated regulatory scrutiny. For CISOs, CTOs, and operations leadership, the question is not whether RPKI matters, it is how to sequence deployment without disrupting production, and how to communicate the risk to boards who are not network engineers.

Boards & Executive Teams

Governance accountability: routing security on the cyber risk register

Cyber risk governance frameworks (ISO 27001, NIST CSF, Essential Eight) focus heavily on endpoint and application security. Routing security often falls through the gap. For boards overseeing ISPs, telcos, cloud providers, or any organisation with an AS number, RPKI deployment status is a legitimate governance question, and one that most cyber risk registers do not yet capture.

NOGs & Industry Community

Collective defence: routing security is a shared infrastructure problem

BGP security works better the more networks deploy it. A single AS enforcing ROV is protected from invalid routes, but propagation of those routes upstream still affects the broader internet. Network Operators Groups across Asia-Pacific are the right venue to drive coordinated adoption, share operational experience, and build the peer pressure that moves industry norms faster than regulatory mandates ever will.

Routing security deployment across Asia-Pacific: the state of play

RPKI adoption in Asia-Pacific has grown substantially, but the work is not done. ROA coverage is uneven across the region, ROV enforcement remains a minority practice among smaller ISPs, and the operational knowledge to deploy and maintain RPKI correctly is not uniformly distributed. Through APNIC training programs delivered in person across 23 economies, I have seen directly where the gaps are and what barriers operators actually face.

APAC Routing Security

The deployment gap: signing is ahead of enforcement, and enforcement is what counts

Across Asia-Pacific, ROA registration has grown substantially, driven by RIR outreach, MANRS commitments, and peer pressure in the NOG community. But ROV enforcement, configuring routers to actually reject Invalid prefixes, lags significantly behind. An RPKI ecosystem where many networks sign ROAs but few enforce ROV provides limited actual security: hijacked prefixes can still propagate to non-enforcing networks. The value of RPKI compounds as enforcement adoption grows. Every additional AS that enforces ROV makes the internet incrementally safer for everyone else.

23 APAC economies worked in, in person
2,000+ Network engineers trained across the region
30+ Years in internet infrastructure operations
MANRS Industry framework: Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security

How a sound RPKI deployment actually unfolds

01

Registry Audit

Reconcile announced prefixes against IRR records and RIR allocations. Fix stale, incorrect, or missing objects before signing ROAs against them.

02

ROA Design

Define max-length policy carefully. Overly permissive max-lengths undermine security; overly restrictive ones break traffic engineering. Get this right before signing.

03

ROA Signing

Create ROAs for all announced prefixes via your RIR's RPKI portal or hosted RPKI service. Validate coverage with external tools (Cloudflare, RIPE Stat) before moving to enforcement.

04

ROV Deployment

Configure RPKI-RTR, validate cache connectivity, apply BGP policy to mark or drop Invalid prefixes. Start on a single upstream session; expand after confirming no reachability impact.

05

Monitoring & Ops

Operationalise: ROA expiry alerting, RPKI cache health monitoring, periodic prefix coverage reviews, and runbooks for handling ROV-induced reachability issues.

Procurement Questions

What matters before you engage

Can ROV enforcement break our routing?

Yes, if your own ROAs are incorrect. This is the most common concern about ROV deployment, and it is also the most manageable risk. Before enabling enforcement, we validate that every prefix you announce has a correct, non-expired ROA with an appropriate max-length, and test in monitoring mode (marking Invalid prefixes without dropping them) before enforcing.

How does routing security fit into a broader cyber risk framework?

Most cyber risk frameworks focus on endpoint security, identity management, and application-layer controls. Routing security operates one layer below, at the network infrastructure level. A BGP hijack can redirect authentication flows, intercept unencrypted traffic, and cause denial of service without touching a single endpoint. RPKI, IRR hygiene, and MANRS conformance are the network-layer equivalents of patching, MFA, and access logging: hygiene controls that most organisations have not yet formally assessed or documented.

Where are you based and what geographies do you cover?

Brisbane, Queensland, with in-person experience delivering routing security training and advisory across 23 economies in Asia-Pacific through APNIC programs. Advisory work is available remotely across the region, with on-site presence where the scope warrants it.

Talk routing security with someone who has deployed it

Whether you are starting your RPKI programme, troubleshooting an ROV deployment, preparing a board briefing on routing risk, or wondering where to begin, start with a conversation. No sales cycle, no pitch deck.

[email protected]