RFC 2725 (rfc2725) - Page 3 of 41

Routing Policy System Security

RFC 2725             Routing Policy System Security        December 1999


1  Overview

   The Internet Routing Registry (IRR) has evolved to meet a need for
   Internet-wide coordination.  This need was described in RFC-1787, an
   informational RFC prepared on behalf of the IAB [14].  The following
   summary appears in Section 7 of RFC-1787.

      While ensuring Internet-wide coordination may be more and more
      difficult, as the Internet continues to grow, stability and
      consistency of the Internet-wide routing could significantly
      benefit if the information about routing requirements of various
      organizations could be shared across organizational boundaries.
      Such information could be used in a wide variety of situations
      ranging from troubleshooting to detecting and eliminating
      conflicting routing requirements.  The scale of the Internet
      implies that the information should be distributed.  Work is
      currently underway to establish depositories of this information
      (Routing Registries), as well as to develop tools that analyze, as
      well as utilize this information.

   A routing registry must maintain some degree of integrity to be of
   any use.  The degree of integrity required depends on the usage of
   the routing policy system.

   An initial intended usage of routing policy systems such as the RIPE
   database had been in an advisory capacity, documenting the intended
   routing policies for the purpose of debugging.  In this role a very
   weak form of authentication was deemed sufficient.

   The IRR is increasingly used for purposes that have a stronger
   requirement for data integrity and security.  This document addresses
   issues of data integrity and security that is consistent with the
   usage of the IRR and which avoids compromising data integrity and
   security even if the IRR is distributed among less trusted
   repositories.

2  Background

   An early routing policy system used in the NSFNET, the policy routing
   database (PRDB), provided a means of determining who was authorized
   to announce specific prefixes to the NSFNET backbone.  The need for a
   policy database was recognized as far back as 1989 [6, 4].  By 1991
   the database was in place [5].  Authentication was accomplished by
   requiring confirmation and was a manually intensive process.  This
   solved the problem for the NSFNET, but was oriented toward holding
   the routing policy of a single organization.





Villamizar, et al.          Standards Track