RIRs enhance support for routing security

BGP hijacking and route leaks represent significant problems in the global Internet routing systems, along with source address spoofing. BGP hijacks are where allocated or unallocated address space is announced by entities who are not holders and are not authorized to use it.

The announcement of allocated address space often creates big news, such as when 53 route prefixes of Amazon were hijacked, but the announcement of unallocated address space (whether IPv4, IPv6 or AS numbers) which are also known as ‘bogons’ often does not generate much publicity as it does not cause immediate disruptions to service or business. With depletion of the IPv4 address space though, the announcement of bogons are on the rise with miscreants scraping the unallocated address space from all RIRs and abusing it.

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) was therefore developed to try to solve these problems, and APNIC (the Routing Internet Registry for the Asia-Pacific region) recently announced it will honour the creation of AS0 ROA objects. They join ARIN, AfriNIC and the RIPE NCC in supporting AS0 ROA objects, with only LACNIC yet to implement this.

APNIC members can create AS0 ROAs for the prefixes they manage using the MyAPNIC platform.

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