pqRPKI: A Practical RPKI Architecture for the Post-Quantum Era

2026-03-07

AI Summary

This work addresses the vulnerability of the current RPKI infrastructure to quantum attacks due to its reliance on RSA cryptography, while acknowledging that naively adopting post-quantum signatures such as Falcon or ML-DSA incurs prohibitive increases in key and signature sizes, thereby inflating bandwidth consumption and validation overhead. To overcome this, the authors propose pqRPKI, a novel framework that introduces a multi-layer Merkle Tree Ladder structure to shift verification material from certificates to Manifests, re-engineering the RPKI manifest and delegation chain to enable top-down differential localization and bottom-up tree reconstruction. The design maintains backward compatibility, supports incremental deployment, and enables efficient batch validation. Experimental results demonstrate a 65.5%–83.1% reduction in repository size (averaging 546.8 MB), full validation in 102.7 seconds, end-to-end update latency of 118.3 seconds, and only 3.4% overhead in dual-stack deployment.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Quantum Machine Learning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Qualitative Reasoning
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking

Abstract

The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) secures Internet routing by binding IP prefixes to authorized Autonomous Systems, yet its RSA foundations are vulnerable to quantum adversaries. A naive swap to post-quantum (PQ) signatures (eg Falcon) is a poor fit for RPKI's bulk model: every relying party (RP) repeatedly fetches and validates the entire global repository, so larger keys and signatures inflate bandwidth and CPU cost, especially during a long dual-stack transition. We present pqRPKI , a post-quantum RPKI framework that pairs a multi-layer Merkle Tree Ladder (MTL) with RPKI objects, customized to relocate per-object verification material from certificates into the Manifest. To update RPKI for Merkle tree based schemes, pqRPKI redesign the RPKI manifest and delegation chain, introduces a ladder-guided sync and bulk-verification workflow that lets validators localize diffs top-down and rebuild trees bottom-up. pqRPKI also preserves current RPKI objects and encodings, supports both hosted and delegated operation, and provides an additive migration path that coexists with today's trust anchors for dual-stack deployment with little size overhead. Implemented as a working publication point (PP) and RPs, we show that pqRPKI reduces repository footprint to 546.8 MB on average (65.5%/83.1% smaller than Falcon/ML-DSA), cuts full-cycle validation to 102.7 s, and achieves 118.3 s end-to-end PP to Router time, enabling sub-2-minute operating cadences with full-repository validation each cycle. Dual-stack deployment with RSA only adds just 3.4% size overhead versus today's RPKI repositories.

Problem

• Post-Quantum Cryptography
• RPKI
• Quantum Threat
• Signature Size
• Bulk Validation

Innovation

• post-quantum RPKI
• Merkle Tree Ladder
• bulk verification
• dual-stack migration
• resource public key infrastructure