BGP Security and PKI Hierarchies (was: Re: Wifi Security)

Wed Nov 23 05:47:40 UTC 2005

      On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, william(at)elan.net wrote:
    > I also seem to remember Bill Woodcock suggesting this at some ARIN
    > meeting in 2001 or 2002. If I recall he proposed that this be somewhat
    > like a document trust with no operations (beyond providing NS service)
    > and when somebody needs a service the ip block would have to be moved
    > to regional RIR.

Right.  The idea was to lock down things which were in the legacy space, 
unless people were prepared to undergo the full scrutiny of having them 
transferred into an RIR (basically dampen the rash of hijackings), give 
ARIN a clear way around the free-services-to-legacy-holders issue, and 
give legacy holders a way around the threat-of-ARIN-trying-to-charge-
them issue.  Seemed like a good idea to a lot of ARIN folks at the time, 
and it was starting to get some headway, when the RIPE and APNIC folks 
realized that it would deprive them of the future possiblity of reclaiming 
legacy space, which they promptly nabbed using the extraordinarily 
ill-considered ERX policy, which just took the problem and multiplied it 
by five.  Basically irreversibly.

So as nice an idea as it was, I'm not sure it has legs in this post-ERX 
world.

                                -Bill