Rogue objects in routing databases

Sat Jan 25 01:02:47 UTC 2020

Hi Florian, NANOG,

While the symptom of (automatically) proxy registered route objects is problematic, perhaps we could also take this opportunity to discuss the underlying issue: we as an industry appear to place our trust in various IRR sources operated by entities that either can't or don't validate whether the actual owner of the involved resource approves the creation of the IRR database object.

We should start to push our customers to maintain their route origin information in databases operated by the RIR or NIR which assigned the resource, or even through RPKI ROAs that were optionally converted into IRR route objects for the ease of consumption. It's also time for the RIRs to take their responsibility in this matter by facilitating services like IRR, RPKI, PTR, etc for legacy IP space under conditions which are palatable to corporate lawyers, if they haven't already done so.

Finally, there doesn't have to be a global "flip the switch" day where we decide to stop trusting 3rd party databases, but even if we start holding ourselves to a higher standard one customer at a time that's still going to have the potential to make a big difference a couple of years down the road.

Best regards,
Martijn Schmidt

PS, a small disclaimer: none of the above are new ideas, nor did I come up with them myself - but it still makes sense to work towards implementing them..
________________________________
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces at nanog.org> on behalf of Florian Brandstetter <florianb at globalone.io>
Sent: 25 January 2020 00:06
To: nanog at nanog.org <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Rogue objects in routing databases

It appears that there is currently an influx of rogue route
objects created within the NTTCOM and RaDB IRR databases, in
connection to Quadranet (AS8100) and China Mobile
International (CMI).

Examples of affected networks are:

193.30.32.0/23
45.129.92.0/23
45.129.94.0/24

Networks, which have seemingly no affiliation with
Quadranet, nor China Mobile International (CMI), which
merely appears to be an upstream of Quadranet and hence
creates the route objects in an automated manner.

Another person has already reached out to Quadranet to find
out the root cause of the creation of these objects. Their
support gave an ETA of 24-72 hours.

The route objects are all identical:

route:      193.30.32.0/23
descr:      CMI  (Customer Route)
origin:     AS8100
mnt-by:     MAINT-AS58453
changed:    qas_support at cmi.chinamobile.com 20200117
source:     RADB

There appears to be a correlation with the affected
networks, a fair share of them is part of AS-SBAG, which in
turn is part of AS-VMHAUS, which in turn is part of AS-
QUADRANET and could yield the importing of these prefixes.
AS-VMHAUS appears to be a customer of Quadranet, listed
within AS-QUADRANET-CUSTOMER-ASSET.

These networks do however have no direct connection to
Quadranet, and are not affiliated with Quadranet, nor are
currently connected to Quadranet, which, entirely ignoring
that the `origin` points to Quadranet, makes the route
object illicit.

Basically this has given AS8100, whether that be
legitimately Quadranet, or somebody impersonating/spinning
up a rogue AS8100, theoretical control over a massive amount
of prefixes, as these can be advertised without restrictions
and very likely reach a fairly high percentage of global
visibility.

--
Florian Brandstetter
President & Founder
SquareFlow Network LTD.

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