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.