Arin Public Incident Report – 4.10 Misissuance Error

A couple of years ago ARIN increased their fees considerably - way higher than fees paid to RIPE for way less resources - and had a call with their management to express my frustration, not because I was paying from my pocket but because of the high discrepancy of the what they wanted to get and the quantity/quality of their services. Now I can see that their backbone services haven't really improved while their income for sure has.

On a sidenote, what I appreciate in both RIPE and ARIN is that you can have at least a proper discussion when you have valid arguments with their support teams.

I like how frank the report is, no sugarcoating. "We relied on manual error prone verification and made a mistake. We have to automate the process."

As ARIN block owner this situation is kinda scary but reading this actually makes me think it's less likely to happen again .

I can't remember a screw up by ARIN this bad before. I understand that mistakes can happen. I'm surprised at how easy it was to make this one though while I'm entirely unsurprised that it involved using an excel spreadsheet.

So at least a good chunk of the Internet does indeed operate on a spreadsheet. Good to know.

Affected customer here, if you're curious on our original NANOG post on the whole situation:

Hey NANOG,

After receiving a BGPAlerter notification that one of our subnets (23.150.164.0/24) had been hijacked, I checked and noticed the prefix in question was missing RPKI. Assuming I had fat fingered something and butchered the ROA, I logged into ARIN and found that the prefix was missing from our resource list entirely, and had been reallocated to another organization and announced from their network. I created a ticket in ARIN and called immediately.

They confirmed that our subnet had been accidentally reallocated to another customer, and that they are currently working on returning it to us. After a couple hours, they told us the other organization will stop announcing the prefix, and WHOIS will be returned shortly.

I’m guessing there’s no way to prevent this kind of thing on our side if the RPKI ROA itself is removed along with the allocation? I’m planning on adding checks to look for missing ROAs (in addition to invalid/expiring ones), which I'm guessing would've caught this earlier.

Have any of you had anything like this happen with ARIN or another RIR? I’m especially curious what might have happened if we’d only noticed and reached out a few weeks later instead of within a few minutes.

The transparency in this incident report is refreshing. "We relied on manual Excel-based verification and screwed up" - no corporate speak, just honest assessment.

What's scary is that IPv4 allocations are literally internet infrastructure. Having your /24 suddenly reassigned to someone else could be catastrophic for a business.

The fact that RPKI didn't catch this is interesting. The ROA was deleted along with the allocation, so from RPKI's perspective everything was valid. This is a good reminder that RPKI protects against hijacking but not against the RIR itself making mistakes.

Glad they're automating this. Anything involving copy-pasting IP ranges in Excel is an accident waiting to happen.

All the RIRs are, in my experience, a very consistent and safe set of hands. This sort of things is vanishing rare to the point of borderline inconsequence by many providers of major internet infrastructure. The fact they care enough to take it seriously and publish shows how much they care about getting it right.

I just completed a fairly major reorganisation of resources with RIPE, and I’ve interacted with them for two decades, and my experience is they remain as steady and consistent as ever.

Sure, you may not like a particular policy at some moment, or may not agree with the charging structure at some point in time when it’s not advantageous to you, but they do at least do what they say and say what they do.

I've considered setting up an ASN and grabbing an IPv6 block for myself for a while now, but have never had the gumption, time, and funds at the same time.

This is a bit beyond my paygrade, but... this is as serious as it sounds, right? I'm just a bit surprised/confused by the response in these comments, especially compared to outages like when CF goes down. It's like that Gordon Ramsay meme. Is ARIN the 8 year old in this situation?