The Routing Assets Database (RADb), formerly known as the Routing Arbiter Database is a public database in which the
operators of Internet networks publish authoritative declarations of routing policy for their
Autonomous System (AS) which are, in turn, used by the operators of other Internet networks to configure their inbound routing policy filters. The RADb, operated by the
University of Michigan's Merit Network
Merit Network, Inc., is a nonprofit member-governed organization providing high-performance computer networking and related services to educational, government, health care, and Non-profit organization, nonprofit organizations, primarily in Michig ...
, was the first such database, but others followed in its wake, forming a loose confederation of
Internet routing registries, containing sometimes-overlapping, and sometimes-conflicting, routing policy data, expressed in
Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL) syntax.
History
The RADb was developed in the early 1990s as part of the
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
(NSF)-funded Routing Arbiter Project. The
Routing Policy Specification Language was subsequently retroactively formalized in RFC 2280, in January, 1998.
Usage
Historically, most larger Internet service providers, and all within the European
RIPE NCC
RIPE NCC (''Réseaux IP Européens'' Network Coordination Centre) is the regional Internet registry (RIR) for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia. Its headquarters are in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with a branch office in Dubai, U ...
region require customers to be registered in an Internet Routing Registry prior to propagating BGP announcements of their routes.
This has not been a rigorously-enforced operational standard, however, and has declined since a peak in the early 2000s.
Security
The Internet Routing Registry system is an artifact of the 1990s era of the Internet, as the Internet's economy and governance were in transition from an academic mode to a commercial mode, and predate the era of ubiquitous
cryptography
Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...
. The RADb initially relied upon a trust model, in which write access to the database was not strictly controlled. A write-permissions access model was subsequently added, in which individuals or roles representing each
Autonomous System had authority to write records related to that AS, including which
IP address
An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface i ...
blocks it would originate routing advertisements for, and which other Autonomous Systems were allowed to advertise
transit
Transit may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film
* ''Transit'' (1980 film), a 1980 Israeli film
* ''Transit'' (1986 film), a Canadian short film
* ''Transit'' (2005 film), a film produced by MTV and Staying-Alive about four people in countrie ...
routing paths to it. The first generation of security allowed network operators to specify a MAIL-FROM attribute, requiring that updates be sent from a specific email address. Next, (B)CRYPT-PW / MD5-PW password hash authentication was added, and finally a PGP-KEY attribute was added, allowing users to cryptographically sign submitted edits.
Subsequent work by the
Regional Internet Registries created additional IRRs which strictly tied permission to advertise IP blocks to RIR allocation data. But since
DNSSEC
The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System ( DNS) in Internet Protocol ( IP) networks. The protoco ...
already existed and had been applied to the
in-addr zone, no end-to-end cryptographic integrity mechanism was ever added to RPSL.
See also
*
Autonomous system (Internet)
An autonomous system (AS) is a collection of connected Internet protocol address, Internet Protocol (IP) routing prefixes under the control of one or more network operators on behalf of a single administrative entity or domain, that presents a com ...
*
Border Gateway Protocol
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector routing protocol, and it ...
*
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, Autonomous system (Internet), autonomous system number allocation, DNS root zone, root zone management in the Domain Name Syste ...
*
Regional Internet registry
A regional Internet registry (RIR) is an organization that manages the allocation and registration of Internet number resources within a region of the world. Internet number resources include IP addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers.
...
*
Routing
Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a Network theory, network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched ...
References
Internet Routing Registry (IRR) homepage* http://www.irrd.net/
IRR Toolset
External links
* {{Official website, https://www.radb.net/
Internet architecture
Internet governance
Internet Standards
Internet databases