RPKI Now Shields 70% of Internet Routes
Original: RPKI now protects 70% of internet routes
Why This Matters
Routing security underpins global internet reliability; broad RPKI adoption cuts hijack risk at scale.
RPKI-valid internet routes jumped from 54% to 70.3% between September 2025 and 2026—a 16.4-point gain, more than the prior two years combined—with China accounting for nearly 60% of the address-level improvement.
RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) lets IP address holders publish signed Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), allowing network operators to reject routing announcements that don't match the record. The system was designed to fix a fundamental BGP trust problem illustrated in 2008, when Pakistan Telecom accidentally hijacked YouTube globally for two hours by announcing incorrect routes that propagated worldwide.
According to IPinfo analysis using RIPE RIS and RouteViews data pulled September 28, 2026, RPKI-valid prefixes now stand at 70.3%, up from 54.0% a year prior—a 30% relative increase. That dwarfs the 3.9 and 3.2 percentage-point gains in the two preceding years.
China drove the bulk of the surge: its IPv4 RPKI-valid share went from just 3.7% to 83.0%. The practical effect is visible in routing data. A valid prefix is seen by a median 596 BGP vantage points; one with no RPKI record by 595. An invalid prefix? Just two. Nearly half of all invalid routes reach only a single vantage point, meaning the filtering is working. The Internet Society Pulse also found RPKI-related BGP activity remains under 1% of daily update volume, so the security layer isn't destabilizing the routing table.
A caveat on country rankings: Spain shows the highest share of invalid IPv4 prefixes at 28.2%, but many of those routes are barely visible across the internet. Raw prefix counts can overstate real-world exposure significantly.