On Sat, Oct 17, 2026 at 08:32:11AM +0200, Theo Buehler wrote:
> Per RFC 9582, section 4.3.2.2, the optional maxLength element of a
> ROAIPAddress indicates the maximum length of an IP address prefix that
> the ROA authorizes the AS to advertise. If it matches the prefix length,
> this carries no additional information, so it can and SHOULD be omitted.
> In the good old tradition of sacrificing far too many lambs on the altar
> of Postel, this SHOULD could not be made a MUST.
> 
> As of today, 26606 out of 398347 ROAs (6.7%) carry this extra element.
> 
> Our internal struct roa_ip has a maxlength containing the value of the
> maxLength (if present) or the prefix length. This lossy representation
> discards the info whether the maxlength should have been there.
> 
> This diff adds that info. I made the slightly dubious choice of using a
> 1-byte boolean because then it lands in a padding byte, thus avoiding a
> few megs of memory overhead in normal mode and shows this in file mode:
> 
> IP address blocks:        154.208.186.0/24 maxlen: 24 (superfluous maxlen)
> 
> I added a -vv warning emitted once per ROA so we can find such ROAs and
> a boolean to the JSON output. Having metrics for these kinds of things
> would be nice, but it needs a bit more thought.

Thanks.

	# rpki-client -p1 -vv 2>&1 | grep 'superfluous max' | sed 's,/, ,' \
		| awk '{ print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | column -t
	10508  rpki.apnic.net
	9729   rpki.afrinic.net
	6369   rpki.arin.net

Perhaps in the future in a similar way non-canonically encoded ROA
eContent can be tracked?

OK job@