Geoff Huston <gih@telstra.net> writes:
I am looking to the regional registeries to take some level of initiative and provide clients of their address allocation service the ability to sign the allocation and then the client can sign the routing request to the provider which the provider can verify against the regional registry. We went through this in discussion in the room at the time and it looked like a viable and useful approach.
Yes, but this is only part of the problem. I mean, fantastic idea, but then it's not exactly transitive. How do I know I can trust that Telstra's announcements have been authorized by the people responsible for the prefixes in question? Worse, since I do not talk directly with Telstra, how do I know I can trust the intermediary networks not to have performed (or fallen victim to) AS path surgery? Moreover, other than prefix-length filtering, what can I do to prevent falling victim to subnet-announcement attacks? Note that a larger CIDR block can still fall victim to announcements of /19s in networks which use The Satanic Filters. Perhaps you have some idea other than mine (prayer) for scalably solving these and similar issues? Sean.