IP adresss management verification

Mon Nov 13 17:11:05 UTC 2006

At 10:36 -0500 11/13/06, John Curran wrote:

>A more interesting question might be:  How does the community think an
>RIR should best verify information in the application process today, and
>should that change as we approach the IPv4 event horizon?

IRIS. ;)

ARIN is in a tricky place.  It has to be open, fair, efficient, and 
able to keep a secret.  Open - listens to the industry without 
requiring any membership.  Fair - policies apply to all on face 
value.  Efficient - low cost to the industry.  Keeping secrets - 
holding confidential data used to justify resource allocations.

As long as there is trust, the most efficient way is to rely on what 
an applicant (for space) claims.  Once trust breaks down, all sorts 
of verification is needed.

There are two parts to this.  One is what is appropriate for ARIN to 
rely upon to verify an application.  The other is what is an 
appropriate way for a third party to question the allocation of 
resources.

I mentioned IRIS above because it is more or less WhoIs-on-steroids. 
One of it's features is the ability to authenticate the client, 
therefore various clients can be authorized to see different (in 
detail) data.  E.g., to the casual observer, 258.127.3.123 belongs to 
"private residence" but to ARIN it belongs to Homer Simpson of 
Springfield.   (ARIN can then verify that the addresses in 
258.127.3/24 are assigned to different residences.)

I'm guilty here of throwing out a solution before the problem.  I'm 
doing this to say that although there is a problem (not as in "we 
gotta solve this now" problem) and it is quite undefined (how does a 
third party appeal an allocation, and how does ARIN defend a 
decision?), we have tools available to work on this already.

Ooh, look, something that looks like a nail.  Let me hit it with my 
IRIS hammer.

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Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

I didn't miss the meeting, I left it before I arrived.