Poster: Evaluating CAIDA's Inferred AS Relationships Through ASPAs

Autonomous System (AS) relationships are the commercial agreements that define how ASes interact to route Internet traffic. For over a decade, researchers have relied on CAIDA's inferred AS relationships, which, however, lack validation against publicly available ground-truth data. This work presents the first systematic validation of CAIDA's AS relationships dataset using Autonomous System Provider Authorization (ASPA) objects—cryptographically signed records of the authorized providers of an AS. Analyzing 124 ASPA-compliant ASes, we find that CAIDA's inference aligns with ASPA data for only 22 ASes, often underestimating the number of providers and, in some cases, misclassifying them as customers.