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[NANOG] US DoD receives chunked IPv6 /13 (14x /22 but not totally consecutive)

  • From: Jeroen Massar
  • Date: Fri May 16 13:10:22 2008

Hi folks,

As everybody is a big fan of securing their networks against foreign
attacks, be aware that the US DoD has been assigned 14 /22's, IPv6 that
is, not IPv4, they all come from a single IPv6 /13 though, which is what
they apparently asked for in the beginning, at least that was the rumor,
well they got what they wanted.

I've recorded it into GRH as a single /13 though, as that is what it is,
and I am not going to bother whois'ing and entering the 14 separate
entries there, as that is useless, especially as they will most likely
never appear in the global routing tables anyway.

Depending on your love for the US, you might want to add special rules
in your network to be able to easily detect Cyber Attacks and other such
things towards that address space, to be able to better serve your
country, may that be the US or any other country for that matter.

I am of course wondering why ARIN gave 1 organization 14 separate /22's,
even though they are recorded exactly the same, just different prefixes
and netnames and it is effectively one huge /13. They could easily have
been recorded as that one /13, it is not like eg Canada (no other
countries that fall under ARIN now is there) will get a couple of the
chunks of remaining space in between there. By assigning them separate
/22's, they effectively are stating that it is good to fragment the
address space and by having them recorded in whois, also that announcing
more specifics from that /13 is just fine.

The other fun question is of course what a single organization has to do
with (2^(48-13)=) 34.359.738.368, yes indeed, 34 billion /48's which
cover 2.251.799.813.685.248 /64's which is a number that I can't even
pronounce. According to Wikipedia the US only has a mere population of
304,080,000, that means that every US citizen can get a 1000+ /48's from
their DoD, thus maybe every nuclear warhead and every bullet is getting
their own /48 or something to be able to justify for that amount of
address space. At least this gives the opportunity to hardcode that
block out of hardware if you want to avoid it being ever used by the
publicly known part of the US DoD. I wouldn't mind seeing the request
form that can justify this amount of address space though, must be a lot
of fun.

Now back to your regular NANOG schedule....

Greets,
     Jeroen

(who will hide himself in a nice Swiss nuclear bunker till the flames
are all gone ;)

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
    which points to: http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html


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