nanog mailing list archives

Re: Security issues based on post RIR allocation rules


From: Mark Foster <blakjak () blakjak net>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2018 07:18:35 +1300

I'll simply endorse the 'stop judging an IP by it's RIR' approach. As a New Zealander (and APNIC is our RIR), having to 
convince  US institutions that our subnets should not be blocked simply because they're out of the same /8 as those 
used by other Asian nations with poorer IP address reputations , is a challenge because, well, a nation of 4.5M in the 
south Pacific is insignificant, right? :S

Also if the whole /8 doesn't sit within the same organisation or country, how is it smart to use it as any sort of 
differentiator?

Have banged my head against this one many times in my career to-date.

Mark.

On 12 December 2018 5:58:18 AM NZDT, Tony Finch <dot () dotat at> wrote:
Spurling, Shannon <shannon () more net> wrote:

When I call a health care organization, or a web hosting provider,
the
first thing I get is that they think we are trying to pull one over
on
them and all these ranges must be in Africa or Asia. I show them the
ARIN information for the specific /16, and sometimes I can make some
headway. Sometimes there's no convincing them. This issue appears to
be
getting worse over time, so I was wondering if some misguided
organization or group is going around pressing for the rules that are
triggering these issues?

I'm somewhat inclined to blame poor `whois` implementations for this.

Apart from `whois` being generally very crappy, there are specific
issues
on the server side and the client side which mean the human driving
whois
often needs a good deal of expertise to be able to properly track down
the
authoritative registration details for a netblock.

On the server side, APNIC and RIPE do not return proper referrals for
ERX
netblocks. This is annoying, because they know which of the other RIRs
is
responsible for the registration - they have to get the reverse DNS
information from the other RIR. Examples: 150.108.0.0 (an APNIC /8 but
the
/16 is allocated to Fordham University and managed through ARIN); and
141.111.0.0 (a RIPE /8 but the /16 is allocated to LANL and managed
through ARIN).

AfriNIC's whois server is more helpful: it seems to proxy queries to
RIPE
and APNIC as appopriate, and returns RDAP referrals for ARIN.

On the client side, these days it is mostly possible to find the
correct
whois server to ask by following referrals from IANA. (In the past
whois
clients had to have a fairly large database of starting points.) A
reasonably intelligent referral-oriented whois client can work around
missing referrals for early netblock allocations by guessing, which
usually means restarting with ARIN. But in practice most whois clients
are
pretty stupid, and the referral-oriented ones keep breaking when
servers
change. (e.g. I just found out AfriNIC's behaviour has changed since I
last looked...)

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot () dotat at>  http://dotat.at/
West Forties, Cromarty, Forth: Southerly or southeasterly 5 or 6,
occasionally
7 in Cromarty. Moderate, becoming moderate or rough. Mainly fair. Good.

-- 
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