Blockchain and Networking

Tue Jan 9 16:22:22 UTC 2018

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 1:07 AM, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:

> How about validating whether a given AS is an acceptable origin for a set
>> of prefixes?
>
>
That's a job for ordinary PKI. Any time you have a trusted central
authority to serve as an anchor, ordinary PKI works fine. The RIRs serve as
anchors for who has the right to authorize which prefixes.

A harder task is validating whether your peer is part of a legitimate AS
path to that origin. It's not obvious to me that blockchain could help
solve that problem, but it's at least a problem that isn't solved by
ordinary PKI.

Now, if we wanted to replace the RIRs and allow people to self-assign IPv6
addresses out of ULA space which we'd then honor in the global BGP table,
blockchain could have a role.

-Bill

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>