Verizon IP's and ARIN Records

Tue Jun 8 08:00:55 UTC 2004

> ARIN is cracking down on IP Space that is or has been issued (legally) and
> have been found to have the contact records  "out of date" or the e-mail
> addresses either don't work or their are mailboxes full and so on. You will
> see more and more of these allocations being removed for failing to act on
> network issue via their stated ARIN information.

ARIN actions are sometimes not totally predictable, but I've not seen 
them remove blocks just because contact info is out of date, in this case
they will simply mark the ip block as invalid and remove dns servers.

Unlike others I actually monitor this and what I have seen suggests the 
blocks are deleted ONLY if the original company actually does not exist 
and there exist legal documents to show that (i.e. court ordered liqudation
or sometimes in cases of ip block actively being abuse after some investigation
they would consider corporate registration data that shows company as 
being dead for several years to be enough). The other reasons are if ip 
block admin actually asked for ip block to be removed (sometimes if he's
getting large space somewhere else instead). 

New this year are that ARIN is beginning to remove blocks when it has 
not been paid renewal fees for some years. This, I think, led to greatly 
increased (by order of 5) number active bogon routes out of ARIN's direct 
allocations blocks like 207/8, 209/8, 216/8, 64/8 now showing up at 
http://www.completewhois.com/bogons/active_bogons.htm
When I saw how bad it has become, I've tried sending reports about active 
bogon routes manually to admins of the networks routing these blocks and 
this led to some of them routes getting removed (most are just old static 
routes still present in the routers although some are on purposely ignoring 
ARIN), but this manual process is time-consuming and for the future I 
hope to create automated system that will be able to send these reports 
once per month to admin contacts listed for ASNs routing these blocks 
(but the reports may not be as well targeted to proper people, when doing 
it manually I could sometimes enter correct contact when I knew which 
network it is, automated system will be harder to tune-in, especially 
given that ARIN contact data listed for ASN whois is also often enough 
out of data, especially for these old blocks).

P.S. On topic to the original post, the Verizon block 206.46.0.0/16 being 
listed as active bogon on completewhois page (or any other route listed 
there) are not equivalent to bogon ip block list used for active filtering.
The active list is created for monitoring purposes based on routeviews 
data based on bogon ip lists prior to when exceptions are applied (like 
current Verizon  case), this is so I could monitor if situation has been 
resolved or not. Just FYI.

> A good example was that fellow trying contact RoadRunner's network center.
> You should be able to do so from their ARIN information on record but...
> nope they let the numbers changes, e-mails fade and people come and go.

That is a problem with ARIN data that there is no validation of it, there
was a policy proposal at ARIN (see http://www.arin.net/policy/2003_16.html)
but it was killed (despite support of a lot of people on the meeting and 
despite that it was already a scaled down version of previous more radical
anti-abuse and data validation proposals) so I'm not sure what will happen
now. There was also another proposal http://www.arin.net/policy/2004_4.html
that also tried to provide for better validity of whois data and it was
also killed. Along the lines of killing every whois related proposal 
at last meeting same also will probably happen to my Whois AUP proposal
http://www.arin.net/policy/2004_4.html (for history of this proposal
see http://www.elan.net/~william/arin_whoisaup_history.htm) which provides 
for having a legal "note" that you should not improperly use data
from whois queries (did you know ARIN is now the only whois registry that 
does not have AUP on how the data may or may not be used?), but for that 
if you dont want it to die you still have a chance to stop it if you 
voice your opinion and send private email in support of the proposal to 
petition at arin.net and also post confirmation of your support at ppml at arin.net

But otherwise few people like myself trying to do anything about it
I'm not sure what will need to happen for ARIN to understand that validity
and security of whois data is important and people rely on that all the 
time and they can't just ignore these issues. Unfortunetly most people who 
actually use their data also the ones who really dont have time or interest
to participate in ARIN political process and as such are not heard at all.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net