LACNIC Develops Its Internet Routing Registry (IRR)

28/11/2019

By Guillermo Cicileo, Head of Internet Infrastructure Research and Development at LACNIC

An Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a database of “route objects” that allows determining and sharing information on the routing policies of organizations on the Internet. This information can be used to configure routers to enforce these policies and avoid issues in the global publishing of Internet routes.

The organizations that publish Internet routing information (autonomous systems) define their routing policies in an IRR, and other organizations can use this information to create BGP filters, often automatically.

LACNIC has strongly promoted the adoption of RPKI, a technology used for a similar purpose: the protection of routing information. Nevertheless, recent changes have made it necessary for LACNIC to have an IRR. RIPE no longer allows organizations in other regions to create objects in its IRR; top-level providers have intensified their requests to ISPs for them to create their objects in an IRR, and these requests are being transferred to the ISP’s end clients, many of whom have difficulty using a paid IRR (such as RADB). Likewise, the technical community has studied and discussed the need for an IRR in the region.

LACNIC’s IRR. Considering these needs, LACNIC began working on the creation of an IRR for its members.

As mentioned above, there is significant deployment of RPKI in the LACNIC region. This allows the main objects of an IRR – route and route6 – to be generated based on RPKI ROAs, as they are semantically equivalent. In turn, other objects such as autnum, maintainers and person can be generated based on whois information.

This led to the design decision that LACNIC’s IRR would be automatically generated based on information that was already available. As a result, it will not be necessary for LACNIC members to maintain information in two different databases.

The system, however, will allow the user to manually specify the AS-SET objects, as this information is currently not available in our other information sources. This object is used by many operators to specify groups of autonomous systems that share a common routing policy (for example, transit, peering, clients, etc.).

LACNIC’s IRR is being developed during this second half of 2019. We estimate that a first version will be available this December, and a stable version in 2020.

The system will be integrated into the Mi LACNIC platform, which means that organizations that manage their resources through this platform will have access to the IRR. The IRR will be a new service offered by LACNIC to its members.

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