[routing-wg] 2019-08 New Policy Proposal (RPKI ROAs for Unallocated and Unassigned RIPE NCC Address Space)

Petrit Hasani wrote on 31/10/2019 14:28:
> A new RIPE Policy proposal, 2019-08, "RPKI ROAs for Unallocated and
> Unassigned RIPE NCC Address Space" is now available for discussion.

This policy is more relevant to IPv6, because there is lots of 
unallocated / unassigned IPv6 address space, and that situation will 
continue indefinitely.

Having said that, there's been no evidence produced that ipv6 hijacking 
is a problem.  Ipv6 is not a scarce resource; nor is unallocated / 
unassigned space as valuable for hijacking as ipv4.

For IPv4, given the timescales of policy development, the policy (if 
accepted) would become active well after the RIPE NCC working ipv4 
allocation pool was empty.  Also, there's a waiting list policy for new 
IPv4 address space, which means that any new IPv4 addresses which become 
available are almost certain to be snapped up immediately.  So the 
benefits of hours to days worth of invalidation seem small.

In effect, this means that the RIPE NCC would end up creating ipv4 ROAs for:

- the temporary address pool
- the ixp pool
- the /16 held in reserve

and basically nothing else.

 From a political point of view, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the idea 
of the RIPE NCC setting out to make preemptive declarations of 
routability for anything other than holders of resource allocations / 
assignments.  This is new and precedents like this could weaken the RIPE 
NCC's case if it were to argue in court that it was inappropriate for it 
to create false ROAs for address blocks.

Overall, the technical value of this proposal is small, and it raises 
potentially difficult and awkward questions about precedent.  I don't 
think that this is a good balance from the point of view of policy 
development.

Nick