[arin-ppml] 2600::/12 LOA

[CJ Aronson]

Joe,

The ends don't always justify the means.  The reason there is a policy
proposal in the ARIN region to stop this practice is because not everyone
covered by these /12 announcements is happy that their addresses were part
of an experiment.  There is a belief that Merit should have had permission
from the entities who had allocations out of these aggregates before
announcing a prefix that included them.   Note also that this is called a
darknet project but these networks were NOT dark.  They were live
production IPv6 deployments around the world.  This is not the same as
announcing an IPv4 /8 that has nothing assigned out of it to see who is
using it who shouldn't be.

Thanks!
----Cathy


On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Joe St Sauver <joe at oregon.uoregon.edu>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> John Curran commented:
>
> #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.
>
> In mid-December 2013 I highlighted this very Merit darknet project in
> a keynote I did for Merit Networks Networking Summit in Ann Arbor, see
> "Networking in These Crazy Days: Stay Calm, Get Secure, and Get Involved,"
> http://pages.uoregon.edu/joe/merit-networking/merit-networking.pdf
> at slide 28.
>
> I think that the Merit IPv6 darknet project was *very* important in helping
> to promote uptake of IPv6 in that it provides empirical evidence that the
> level of "background radiation" in IPv6 space isn't very high right now
> (roughly ~1Mbps), and what is there is typically the result of
> misconfiguration rather than malicious scanning (or at least that's what
> was reported in the Merit technical paper summarizing that experience,
> as cited in my slides).
>
> Moreover, given BGP route selection rules, I'm not particularly disturbed
> by the presence of that covering announcement: any more specific route
> should
> immediately be preferred to a broad covering route of the sort employed by
> the IPv6 darknet research effort.
>
> I believe that ARIN acted properly in supporting this network research, and
> I'd be quite disappointed if ARIN (and other RIRs) discontinued support for
> research of this sort, particularly when carefully done by leading academic
> networking research organizations.
>
> Regards,
>
> Joe St Sauver, Ph.D. (joe at oregon.uoregon.edu)
>
> Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the Merit Darknet effort, and all
> opinions expressed in this note are purely my own.
> _______________________________________________
> PPML
> You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to
> the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List (ARIN-PPML at arin.net).
> Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at:
> http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml
> Please contact info at arin.net if you experience any issues.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-ppml/attachments/20140329/5450efe2/attachment.htm>