[arin-ppml] RPKI Relying Agreement

[John Curran]

On Dec 4, 2014, at 11:26 AM, David Huberman <David.Huberman at microsoft.com<mailto:David.Huberman at microsoft.com>> wrote:

I'd normally agree with this.  I'd rather take risk as Microsoft than have ARIN take the risk.

But consider:   We pay for ARIN services, but ARIN refuses to warranty that the services we pay for (rDNS, RPKI, and Whois) will be available.

Why doesn't the RSA warranty those basic and critical operational services?

The reason that the RIRs have disclaimer of warranty and indemnification clauses
for RPKI services is actually quite simple: despite striving to deliver highly available
RPKI services, you are supposed to be using best practices in use of the service,
and this include recognizing that failures can occur and such should not result in
operation impact (i.e. exactly the opposite of your “my routing decisions are affected
and breakage happens” statement in your prior email.)   Specifically, your RPKI
deployment approach should be following known operational best practices for
RPKI, such as those in RFC 7115 / BCP 185, "Origin Validation Operation Based
on the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI)” -
   “… Local policy using relative preference is suggested to manage the uncertainty
    associated with a system in early deployment; local policy can be applied to
    eliminate the threat of unreachability of prefixes due to ill-advised certification
    policies and/or incorrect certification data. “

Note that the claims that could ensue from an operator failing to follow best practices
and then third-parties suffering an major operational outage is likely to be large and
extremely protracted, with potential for endangering the registry itself due to the nature
of litigation and its requirement to actually go to all the way to trial in order to be able
to then introduce evidence and prove that the RPKI services were operating properly
at the time of the event.  If the RIRs did not seek indemnification for use of the RPKI
services, then all of their other registry services could potentially be put at risk due to
the need to defend errant litigation, even presuming perfect RPKI service delivery.
Undertaking that risk to the other services that everyone else presently rely upon
(Whois, reverse DNS) is not reasonable particularly during this time when the RPKI
parties are supposed to be deploying via conservative routing preference practices.

ARIN does make the expectations very clear and explicit in its agreements, and that
is different from the other RIRs.  Again, are the other RIR RPKI non-warranty and
indemnification clauses equally problematic for you, or is the fact that they are
implicitly bound address your concerns?  This has come up before on the NANOG
mailing list (see attached) but it was unclear if the outcome was an expectation that
all RIRs should drop these clauses, or that ARIN should make agreement to them
be implicit.

Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

===
Begin forwarded message:

Subject: Re: APNIC RPKI TAL agreement
From: John Curran <jcurran at arin.net<mailto:jcurran at arin.net>>
Date: October 16, 2014 at 7:30:48 PM EDT
Cc: Wes George <wesley.george at twcable.com<mailto:wesley.george at twcable.com>>, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com<mailto:randy at psg.com>>, "Geoff Huston" <gih at apnic.net<mailto:gih at apnic.net>>
To: Michael Sinatra <michael at burnttofu.net<mailto:michael at burnttofu.net>>

On Oct 16, 2014, at 3:19 PM, Michael Sinatra <michael at burnttofu.net<mailto:michael at burnttofu.net>> wrote:

Hi John:

At NANOG 62, you mentioned that APNIC has a similar agreement as ARIN to
use its trust-anchor locator (TAL), but that it is not a click-through
agreement like ARIN's.  I have searched using basic google-foo for this
agreement, and have also looked on APNIC's certificate rsync server
(which also has an HTTP interface) and I can't find it.  Can you, or any
other recipient of this message who is familiar with the APNIC
agreement, point me in the right direction?

Michael -

Review <http://www.apnic.net/services/manage-resources/digital-certificates/terms-and-conditions>
wherein there is a limitation of liability and requirement that a recipient of any digital certificate
will indemnify APNIC against any and all claims by third parties for damages of any kind arising
from the use of that certificate. (last two bullets)

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN





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