[arin-ppml] 2600::/12 LOA

[John Curran]

On Mar 28, 2014, at 11:56 AM, David Farmer <farmer at umn.edu> wrote:

> On 3/28/14, 11:32 , David Huberman wrote:
>> David:
>> 
>> That summary of the issue helps a lot, thank you!
>> 
>> The question on my mind is:
>> 	Did ARIN provide a written LOA to Merit to announce 2600::/12 ?
> 
> I have no direct knowledge one way or the other, I have to defer to ARIN staff to answer that question.  Paging John Curran please. :)
> 
> However, In addition to what CJ referenced, the presentation given at RIPE 66 (slide 7) implies that ARIN and the other RIRs did provide an LOA, doesn't say "written" but again I think that is implied as well.

Yes, ARIN provided the referenced LOA, which is a bit of a surprise to 
me as well.  I'm looking into the details on this now, but here's the 
short version of what I know at this point -

ARIN has often cooperated with Merit on darknet research activities, and 
this includes providing authorization to enable looking into latent traffic 
on space not yet issued by ARIN.  Some typical examples that come to mind 
include new /8's just received from IANA and the /10 for shared transition 
space.

We were asked to cooperate with Merit on darknet research on ARIN's IPv6
2600::/12 space and I authorized the effort.  Apparently, the effort also
included the routing an overall covering prefix and I missed that aspect 
of the project.  Aside from the technical concerns outlined here, there 
is also a very valid question of whether ARIN should ever be involved in 
routing authorization covering already issued space, since presumably the 
same dialogue and consensus in the operator community (that should be a 
prerequisite for such an experiment) should also suffice as the approval 
with ISPs when it comes to researchers actually inserting the necessary 
routes.

Going forward, ARIN will not issue routing authorization that covers any
address space issued to others without community-developed policy that
specifically directs us to do so.   

Sincerely, 
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN