Outstanding LACNIC Participation at the Buenos Aires IETF Meeting

28/04/2016

Marking the 30^th anniversary of Internet standards development, the Internet Engineering Task Force —the global team of engineers and professionals that agrees the technical aspects of Internet operation— met for the first time in Latin America and the Caribbean.

LACNIC had the privilege of co-organizing the historic meeting held in early April in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, which was attended by more than 1,000 professionals from 55 different countries. In addition, the LACNIC delegation that participated at the IETF contributed to the general sessions and other activities organized around the event.

During one of the plenary sessions held during the week long IETF meeting, Oscar Robles, LACNIC’s CEO, offered a conference on “Internet Deployment Challenges in the Developing World,” where he proposed focusing technical efforts on bringing connectivity to areas of the region with fewer economic resources (watch video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_wgZm8oUnc).

LACNIC’s engineering department organized an RPKI Signing Party where they shared the tools that LACNIC provides its community for the purpose of cryptographically signing LACNIC member numbering resources and creating certificates and ROAs (Route Origin Authorizations). Likewise, the use of the “RPKI ROA-Wizard” was demonstrated, a tool that simplifies the ROA creation process and suggests recommendations based on each member’s BGP announcements, as well as the new version of “RPKI Announcements,” a tool that that allows verifying the validity of resource status in real-time after creating the corresponding certificates and ROAs in the RPKI repository.

Another highlight of LACNIC’s participation at the IETF Buenos Aires meeting was the Hackathon, a competition for programmers where developers are encouraged to discuss, collaborate and develop ideas, sample code and solutions showcasing practical implementations of the IETF standards. LACNIC’s technical team participated in this competition with great success.