Deepak Gouda

Accurately mapping Internet address space to organizations is critical to understanding the Internet’s organizational ecosystem. Traditional approaches, which rely on individual WHOIS queries often suffer from unclear ownership structure of IP addresses and inconsistent organization names, resulting in ambiguous inferences. Alternative methods that map BGP prefixes to Autonomous Systems Numbers (ASNs) and ASNs to organizations are also inaccurate since ASes often originate prefixes on behalf of their customers. This paper introduces Prefix2Org, a comprehensive prefix-to-organization mapping framework. We introduce a taxonomy for the holders of IP addresses and a methodology to map IP addresses to organizations, based on the operational rights over them. We develop string processing heuristics and leverage RPKI Certificates and routing data to address inconsistencies in organizational names and aggregate prefixes under unified management. Our public dataset covers 99.96% (99.99%) of IPv4 (IPv6) prefixes. We validate 9.3% of routed IPv4 addresses with a 99% recall, and 5.6% of IPv6 prefixes with a 99.34% recall. For the two large organizations where we obtained complete ground truth, Prefix2Org produced no false positives. Finally, in two case studies, (i) we characterize organizations that hold address space without an ASN and (ii) demonstrate how RPKI adoption measured through Prefix2Org differs from the previously used AS-centric view.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) has emerged as a standard for enhancing the security of Internet routing. Currently, more than 50% BGP prefixes are covered by RPKI Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs), enabling networks to validate the origin of prefix advertisements in BGP. Despite this progress, ROA adoption remains non-uniform, with key stakeholders encountering significant barriers in the adoption process. In this paper, we combine a product adoption framework with data-driven analysis of global RPKI adoption to identify persistent disparities and pinpoint the stages of the adoption process that hinder broader growth. Our study reveals that, although RPKI awareness has grown, the complexity of planning and deploying ROAs remains a significant challenge. Since no unified workflow and documentation exist for ROA planning, many organizations are left without clear operational guidance. To address this challenge, we propose a systematic framework for ROA planning and introduce ru-RPKI-ready, a platform designed to provide data and insights to facilitate ROA planning. Using ru-RPKI-ready, we characterize the routed address space not covered by RPKI ROAs. We find that 47% IPv4 and 71% IPv6 prefixes not in RPKI could be covered with minimal technical effort. Our analysis also reveals that if as few as ten organizations were to take the necessary actions, the global ROA coverage could increase by 7% for IPv4 and 19% for IPv6.

Accurate mapping of Autonomous Systems (ASes) to their owner organizations is fundamental for understanding the structure and dynamics of the Internet. However, as AS numbers have traditionally been delegated in an ad-hoc manner and organizational ownership has evolved over time, many organizations have registered resources under different names. Traditionally, researchers have relied on datasets like AS2Org, which map ASNs to organizations primarily using WHOIS records, but WHOIS inconsistencies often lead to missed and false relationships. We propose a new approach by leveraging the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to map ASNs to their managing organization. Our methodology combines multiple data sources: WHOIS records to extract organization names, RPKI certificates to identify potential siblings, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to find evidence not visible in WHOIS records currently. This integrated approach enables a more robust and accurate mapping of ASNs to organizations, notably improving inferences for 14% of multi-ASN clusters.