Earlier this month I was fortunate to travel to Taichung, Taiwan for APNIC 44.  I’d like to share with you a few a few notes from the meeting.

The conference website for those wishing to jump for more details… https://conference.apnic.net/44/

 

Policy SIG

Prop-116 – Block transfers from last /8 (103/8). APNIC’s last /8 policy gives /22s to new entrants.  Some new entrants are getting blocks and then just selling them.  So this policy blocks transfers and requires organizations to return the unused blocks to APNIC for reallocation under the last /8 policy. This policy reached consensus and is moving to last call. As a result of consensus, the APNIC EC has issued a statement that all transfers are now blocked from 103/8.

Prop-118 – No need in APNIC. This is a policy to mirror the RIPE policy. After discussion it failed to reach consensus and is going back to the mailing-list. There was a question to APNIC secretariat about how many transfers thus far have been blocked for lack of need. The answer was 1. No details were given on why, but people used this fact to say there is not problem that needs to be solved here.

Prop-119 – Temporary transfers. This policy was promoted as needed because reallocations or reassignments weren’t “good enough.”  The policy draft required an end date to transfer, then a block would be returned to original organization.  The policy didn’t specify minimum term.  There was an interesting and quite lively discussion on this one. It failed to reach consensus and there was significant opposition. The policy will be returned to the mailing-list.

Prop-120 – Adjust the last /8 policy. The policy sought to combine the two current pools 103/8 & recovered pool (which currently has a wait list) after 103/8 is exhausted. The community wanted to preserve the “new entrant” gets something ideal, so combining the two pools didn’t make sense to many. There was a discussion of then how to combine/prioritize the wait-list. This policy failed to reach consensus and is going back to the mailing-list.

Prop-121 – Simpler Initial Ipv6 allocations. Removes the 200 assignments plan requirement, everyone gets the minimum, unless you want to provide a detailed plan for getting more.  Policy reached consensus, moving to last call.

Prop-122 – Simpler Subsequent Ipv6 allocations. If 121 reaches consensus, then prop-122 subsequent allocations policy should also be adjusted to bring it in line with initial allocation. Policy reached consensus, moving to last call.

NIR SIG

I always find it interesting to see how the NIRs work within the RIR structure. While the update reports are sometimes just some quite repetitive stats, I did find the following interesting to note.

CNNIC – reports 93% of Chinese internet users use mobile as their connection method. They are spending significant effort to promote and train people to use RPKI.

KRNIC – KRNIC is undergoing a process to update all of their reallocation records with ISPs within their subregion. Still working on completing DNSsec signing of all their reverse zones.

INNIC – The “national” internet exchange in Indonesia has a peak rate of over 300Gbps and an interesting distributed topology throughout larger islands. INNIC is building their own “myINNIC” portal for members to access their records.

NAT w/ Geoff

Geoff Huston is off promoting NAT as the savior of the Internet now. Not really, but sort of, I certainly disagree with some of his conclusions. As someone who has lost days dealing with nat10 overlap between organizations, and trying to route/nat/encrypt/nat between multiple enterprise networks, the idea that we’d want to continue to add more NAT just sounds crazy to me if we don’t have to. Has NAT solved the issue with extra addresses needed at the edge, yes, and well it works well in the home CPE market. But beyond that, I’m not sure I’d promote NAT as a solution.

APNIC services

APNIC now has an organization object structure within its database. (Also some new contacts features in their portal)

APNIC continues to see fraud with address records, with people creating fake documentation and justification for resource needs. Often seen attempts at quick transfers with these kinds of fraud activities.

APNIC is continuing to look at how they want to be involved in the IP-geo-location issues.  They have a geoloc field in their database objects, but it is seldom used. Many other organizations feel like APNIC records are responsible for their addresses being located “somewhere else.” The conversation seemed to ignore that there are many different large commercial organizations which build geolocation databases (not off of whois information) and those records need to be updated too when a block is moved between organizations.

George Michaelson had a presentation about IRR and RPKI. With the idea to try and start people talking about how routing records should be created/stored in the future.  One interesting note there was that JPNIC now has (or will have soon) expiration dates on all RPSL records such that a regular review cycle is now required for all routing records. This certainly sounds like a good idea, if you assume RPSL is a good idea long term.  I don’t know if this would work well in other regions outside of JPNIC.

ASO review

APNIC will be chartering a working group to gather info from the public for the future structure of the ASO based upon the ITEMs consulting review of the ASO. Aftab Siddiqui and Izumi Okutani will be the co-chairs.

APNIC member meeting

Based on trends so far APNIC expects to transfer less (when measured by total addresses transferred) IPv4 addresses in 2017 compared to 2016 & 2015. A comparable year to 2014. Total number of transfers is projected to be up slightly in 2017 compared to 2016.

APNIC now using the new RDAP whowas specification implementation. https://www.apnic.net/about-apnic/whois_search/whowas/

There was a comment about the “ready to ROA” program and if it was perhaps distracting from other work that was perhaps more important. It seemed like there was some implication that people were just creating ROAs without fully understanding the implications or have any intent to use the RPKI for routing validation. (But perhaps I was reading too much into the comments I heard offline)

 

 

 

 

I recently returned from the APNIC meeting in Auckland, New Zealand.  Here are a few notes and highlights from the meeting.

IPv4 Transfer Panel

A interactive panel on current trends in the IPv4 transfer market.

Alain Duran (ICANN Research) – IPv4 market might be considered concentrated depending on how you slice the data.  The RIRs are reporting transfers in different formats and different fields and this is hindering analysis.  Most transfers are happening in the region, but some are moving between the regions (ARIN is a net exporter).  Most of the addresses that are being transferred are “old” ones that were issued more than 20 years ago. (copy)

Geoff Huston (APNIC) – The largest transfers are happening in the ARIN region.  More than 58M addresses were transferred globally in 2015. There is a difference between what we see in the routing table for transfers vs. what is recorded in the registry.  We don’t have a good way to measure the amount of addresses that are being Leased/Rented.  We also can’t measure how many devices are behind NATs.  Transfers aren’t making a difference in the route-table growth. (copy)

Sandra Brown (IPv4 Market Group) – Sandra that price will still rise, but is currently being depressed due to the large blocks (/8’s) coming to market.  Price differentials between regions have largely disappeared since inter-RIR transfers have started with RIPE.  Using the /16 as a base size block, pricing bottomed out in Sept 2015 at about $5/IPv4 address and is now in the $7-8 range for /16s. (copy)

Gabe Fried (HilcoStreambank) – Only 1/3 of large “Elephant” transactions have been recorded with the registry.  Smaller blocks command price premiums, so some holders are choosing to break up their blocks and slowly sell them over the course of a year generating additional value to the current block holder.  Largest transactions (Option Agreements): Buyer pays at closing, seller keeps the block until the buyer is ready to transfer, buyer retains the right to direct the seller to transfer the blocks to a specific receiver at a future time.  10% of the volume of addresses are direct transfers constituting 96% of transfer transactions.    The remaining 4% of the transactions are 90% of the address transfer volume.  (copy)

Q&A period included discussions about how Letters of Authority (LOAs) are being used to route blocks.  Organizations should really check to see if people are really authorized to advertise blocks.  There was some discussion about if reassignment records be used to record renting and leasing records?  How can we bring more transparency to the industry for options contracts and leasing/renting issues.

YouTube video of panel

Address policy working group (Policy sig)

All formal action items were resolved before the meeting; 2 policies were implemented recently: Prop-113 & Prop-114

Prop-113 – new minimum assignment criteria, for a /24

• Currently multihomed
• Currently using a /24 and intends to multihome
• Plans to multihome with 6 months

Prop-114 – new ASN assignment criteria

• Currently multihomed OR have previous allocated PI space and intend to multihome in the future

2 new proposals submitted were not accepted by chairs:

First proposal submitted allowed aggregation of /21 approvals instead of /22 from 103/8 and /22 from other pool.

Second proposal submitted required whois contact email should be validated once per month.

Prop-105 – IANA returns pool – allows an organization to get another /22

The IANA returns pool is depleting. The non-103/8 pool is for a second /22 per organization. The pool will deplete soon likely in April/May 2016. March will add a /15. September will add an /18. Recovered blocks, if any, go into this pool as well. When the pool depletes, it’s going to bounce a few times as it gets repeatedly depleted and then refilled. Secretariat proposed at the Jakarta meeting the creation of a waiting list for this pool. The staff has started working on implementation of the wait-list which will be based on a strict order of request.

BGP route Hijacking

prefix hijacked (copy)

Interesting presentation about blocks that are being hijacked and the methods (fraudulently prepared LOAs) to get the blocks routed.  Don’t trust LOAs, they are sometimes not worth the “paper” they are written on.

BGP Hijack Issue on Nov 6 2015

Some hijackings are causing a race to the bottom of announcing everything as /24s in some cases.  This could have longer-term issues if this type of behavior became the norm rather than a transient exception.

vizAS

APNIC has a new tool that one can use to visualize ASN data.

http://labs.apnic.net/vizas