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Re: Blockchain and Networking


From: Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2018 11:34:53 -0500

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 11:22 AM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 1:07 AM, John R. Levine <johnl () 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


in particular RPKI -> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6810


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.


this part of the problem is BGPsec -> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8205



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.


yes, here's a useful use for blockchains... allocation of random numbers,
and logging of same in a globally available fashion.


-Bill


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



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