Internet Routing Registry

An Internet Routing Registry (IRR) is a public database which allows Internet service providers to publish, and look up, the information they need to determine who is authorized to connect networks to the Internet. By validating this authorization, they seek to prevent accidental or malicious "route hijacking" which could cause organizational web sites and email, and people's Internet access, to be interrupted or misdirected.

In more technical terms, IRRs are databases of Internet route objects for determining, and sharing route and related information used for configuring routers, with a view to avoiding problematic issues between Internet service providers. The earliest IRRs depended upon access control to prevent unauthorized parties from entering bogus route objects; more recently, cryptographic signatures have been employed to allow direct validation of the objects themselves. Because many IRRs exist, disambiguating conflicts between conflicting or disagreeing route objects held in different IRRs had come to significantly hinder their use prior to the advent of cryptographically signed objects.

The Internet routing registry works by providing an interlinked hierarchy of objects designed to facilitate the organization of IP routing between organizations, and also to provide data in an appropriate format for automatic programming of routers. Network engineers from participating organizations are authorized to modify the Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL) objects, in the registry, for their own networks. Then, any network engineer, or member of the public, is able to query the route registry for particular information of interest.

Relevant objects

• AUT-NUM^[1]
• INETNUM6^[2]
• ROUTE^[3]
• INETNUM^[4]
• ROUTE6^[5]
• AS-SET^[6]

Status of implementation

In some RIR regions, the adoption/updates of for e.g. AUT-NUM^[7] (Represents for e.g. Autonomous system) is only done when the record is created by the RIR, and as long nobody complains about issues, the records remain unreliable/original-state. Most global ASNs provide valid information about their resources in their e.g. AS-SET^[8] objects. Peering networks are highly automated, and it would be very harmful for the ASNs.

See also

• Resource Public Key Infrastructure
• Autonomous system (Internet)