In this episode of PING, we talk with Job Snijders about secure Internet routing again, focusing on an approach to preserving the state of RPKI as a longterm historical record for research and analysis. Job was last on PING to discuss the “Erik” protocol.Job has been running an archive of RPKI state for some time, as a volunteer activity but an exercise which was feasible when BGP speakers producing ROA objects was measured in the hundreds to low thousands is significantly more expensive when the population of ROA producers is a more realistic percentage of the around 80,000 AS holders worldwide.Because Public Key Cryptography depends on a regular re-signing, and re-cataloging (as another signed object, the RPKI “Manifest” file) even when there is no substantive change in the state of signed information, a large amount of “churn” can be seen in the data, and even a compressed form of this state in turn incurs a huge overhead in storage of hard-to-compress data. Job reached the limits of his free activity, and started to explore a more compact and useful representation. This has emerged in the IETF standards process as two related activities. The Canonical Cache Representation or CCR, and the aggregation over this for data represented as the RPKI Spool data model for “materialising” the state of RPKI objects.Along with his fellow IETF draft authors Bart Bakker , Tim Bruijnzeels, Theo Buehler and Fedor Vompe Job has managed to define a remarkably compact, highly compressible representation of RPKI validated objects, and the cryptographic payloads. These systems have been designed to leverage well known UNIX and other techniques for data management such as the “tar” format for spooled data, ASN.1 for binary encoding, Merkle Trees to hold compact hash state, and data compression using the zstd encoding.It’s a nice approach to solving the scaling problem.