Folks,

Please see the draft minutes from our WG Session in Rotterdam. If you have any 
corrections or objections, could you please let us know ASAP?

Thanks,

Brian
Co-Chair, RIPE AA-WG

Brian Nisbet
Service Operations Manager
HEAnet CLG, Ireland's National Education and Research Network
1st Floor, 5 George's Dock, IFSC, Dublin D01 X8N7, Ireland
+35316609040 brian.nis...@heanet.ie www.heanet.ie
Registered in Ireland, No. 275301. CRA No. 20036270

From: Aa-wg-chair <aa-wg-chair-boun...@ripe.net> On Behalf Of Alun Davies
Sent: Monday 16 December 2019 09:52
To: aa-wg-ch...@ripe.net
Subject: [aa-wg-chair] Draft Anti-Abuse WG Minutes from RIPE 79

Hello Brian, Tobias, Alireza,

Please find attached the draft minutes for the Anti-Abuse WG session at RIPE 
79. Do take a look when you have a moment and let us know if you’d like any 
changes made. If we don’t hear back from you by the end of this week, we’ll go 
ahead and publish them as is to the website.


Cheers,
Alun Davies
RIPE NCC

Attachment: Draft Anti-Abuse WG Minutes RIPE 79.docx
Description: Draft Anti-Abuse WG Minutes RIPE 79.docx

Anti-Abuse Working Group 

Thursday, 17 October 09:00 - 10:30

Chair: Brian Nisbet

Scribe: Ulka Athale
Status: Draft



Co-Chair Brian Nisbet welcomed attendees, thanked the RIPE NCC staff supporting 
with scribing and monitoring chat, the stenographers, and stated that his 
co-Chair Tobias could not attend the session. The minutes from the Anti-Abuse 
session at RIPE 78 were approved. In his opening remarks, he mentioned the 
policy proposal 2019-03 that was withdrawn, and that he was surprised by the 
form of words of the Impact Analysis and that the Executive Board said that 
they were not going to do the thing that the community may or may not be asking 
them to do. In this case the policy proposal was withdrawn, but if it had been 
approved by the working group, it might have led to a constitutional crisis of 
sorts, and this is something that should be discussed. Brian asked the room if 
they had any further remarks on this issue. There were no comments.



C.1. RIPE NCC Update on 2017-02

Marco Schmidt - RIPE NCC

Presentation available at: https://ripe79.ripe.net/archives/video/244



Jordi Palet Martinez asked if the 25% was after they sent the additional 
emails, after the automated validation failed. 



Marco clarified that there was one month in which they sent several automated 
emails with a stricter tone, and there was still around 20-25% who didn’t 
respond, requiring additional action.



Brian Nisbet asked if this now happens as a regular part of the process, once a 
year. Marco replied that in general it is a part of the regular process. The 
most important abuse mailboxes to fix were the LIR ones. If the abuse mailboxes 
of independent resources and more specific PA ones were not working, they would 
go to the sponsoring LIR to check the abuse contact.



Herve Clement, Orange, said that he was pretty happy with the proposal. He 
added that he had a question about the workload for the RIPE NCC, but that 
Marco had already partially answered it. He added that he thought that Marco 
now had an element to respond to the next policy proposals, proposed by Jordi 
perhaps, to evaluate the possible workload of the RIPE NCC and how to go a step 
further beyond such verification.



Rudiger Volk, Deutsche Telecom, asked Marco whether he saw any additional work 
to improve this process and the communications attached to it. He said that he 
didn’t find the information he was receiving very helpful, he would require 
time to work out which customers are actually the source of the problem. He 
suggested looking into providing mechanisms that automates the research on the 
RIPE NCC side and allows the recipient of the problem report to do what they 
are required to without additional efforts.



Marco thanked Rudiger for his feedback and said he would talk to him in more 
detail about how to make things clearer.



Brian also thanked Marco for his work as Policy Development Officer, in light 
of the announcement that Marco will be moving on to the Registration Services 
team at the RIPE NCC. 



C.2. Policy Proposal 2019-04 - Validation of "abuse-mailbox"

Jordi Palet Martinez, The IPv6 Company

Presentation available at: https://ripe79.ripe.net/archives/video/301



Peter Koch, DENIC, commented that when regulators, who are increasingly 
interested in policy making, come up with suggestions, the community usually 
demands that it is fact-based policy or evidence-based policy making. He asked 
Jordi what real world problem he was trying to solve, notwithstanding the 
inclusion of percentages.



Jordi replied that it was simple, the point of having a registry is to have the 
right registration data.



Ruediger said that he agreed with Peter. He had a slightly different angle on 
the same topic. In many of the policy proposals, it looks like people really 
want to police and it is not what RIPE is about. It is strange that Germans 
object to that. Peter pointed out that Jordi is creating compliance conditions, 
while not really spelling out what should be done. He would take that argument 
a step further and say that the purpose of this working group should be helping 
people who fail somewhere to do a better job. He didn’t see anything that 
tells people what is expected. If we formalize compliance criteria, evil people 
will construct robots and comply.



Jordi disagreed, and he tried to find the right wording, and was open to 
improving that. He added that someone can always trick the validation, but that 
doesn’t mean they are complying with the policy.



Rudiger replied that he disagreed and his point was that nothing in this 
process helps people set up processes respond to the real life cases, beyond 
the formal check.



Brian added that that there was an apt point made that part of the role of the 
Working Group is to educate and help. If indeed the policy was to reach 
consensus, there would be a work item to give more information and help. The 
disagreement between the Jordi and Rudiger on the policy was noted.



Carlos Friacas, FCCN, said that he thought the problem statement was pretty 
clear. There are people who don’t like to answer abuse checks, so this was an 
effective way with minimum trouble. An abuse contact is part of data if we’re 
trying to have a registry with the most accurate information. Something has to 
be done to improve the registry, it’s as though it’s ok to register abuse 
contacts for Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse.



Peter Koch said that the issue of accuracy has been discussed in multiple 
places. The bigger topic of what is the purpose of the registry will be 
discussed in the RIPE community plenary and be addressed by a task force. He 
added that we need to be careful about policy proposals concerning the 
jurisdiction of this community. If they want to set the business process of 
LIRs, ISPs or network operators, then the question is how far the community can 
rule those. He would rather see that in an explicit discussion rather than 
sliding into policy proposals that actually only define policing tests. This is 
a more constitutional issue – what can this community set policies or rules 
for and I think going to the business processes is a step too far.



Jordi replied that he agreed with Peter as far as the previous version of the 
policy proposal was concerned, there was too much in-depth process management, 
but that was no longer the case in the newer version.



Brian reminded the working group that there were roughly two weeks of the 
discussion period left, and asked them to share their comments on the mailing 
list and forum.



E.1. "How Effective is ASN-Drop?"

Carlos Friacas, FCCN

Presentation available at: https://ripe79.ripe.net/archives/video/245



Ruediger stated that he was primarily a routing person and has spent a lot of 
effort on routing security. Carlos was essentially suggesting taking a source 
of reputation classification and that is very different from security.



Carlos replied saying that reputation is a source for applying security.



Ruediger replied that he disagreed and that he was pretty sure that most 
routing people would disagree too. The source of information has to be 
understood thoroughly, and that he hadn’t made that kind of study of the 
Spamhaus list.



Carlos pointed out that 56% of the shortlist no longer show up on routing 
tables.



Ruediger said that he didn’t know why they got there. When he looks at 
routing tables, he sees a lot of odd stuff including faked origin ASes, AS 
paths that are not technically valid, in RPKI – ROAs for ASNs that should not 
show up for public routing. Looking at RPKI, reputation does not help because 
in RPKI there are authorisation forecasts that are completely invalid. It was 
also unclear what would be done with ROAs that are authorising bad reputation 
ASes.



Carlos said that this was a problem for him as well.



Ruediger stated that RPKI and reputation are separate worlds and there is no 
clear and useful interaction between them. Carlos replied that this indicator 
is possibly a sign that such a blacklist is not fully usable. Ruediger replied 
that mismatches can indicate problems on one side or an another. Carlos added 
that if 50% of the list is not announced, the value of dropping also drops. The 
problem with the number is that it is just a snapshot.



Ruediger said that a lot of mail only make temporary use of a lot of certain 
ASes, and the bad reputation might get attached to that and be marked, even if 
the usage occurs once in a while.



Carlos asked that if someone’s ASN got on the list, that person would try to 
delist it. Ruediger concluded by saying the reputation of the reputation list 
would go down.



E.2. "LACNIC's WARP Centre"

Guillermo Cicileo, LACNIC

Presentation available at: https://ripe79.ripe.net/archives/video/247



Carlos Friacas, FCCN said that he recognised that they had a lot of stuff 
provided by LACNIC that they didn’t have in the RIPE community. He hoped that 
the community would find the resources and will to build more and get to the 
point where LACNIC is. He congratulated Guillermo for all their work with 
regards to warning advice and reporting points.



Jordi Palet thanked him for volunteering to do the talk. The reason why he and 
Carlos suggested having a talk on this topic is because of their work on the 
BGP hijacking proposal, and this is also interesting for this community. The 
question is for all of us, what do we think about this. This working group is 
tasked to help the community, and as he found it useful, he wanted opinions on 
that from the group.



Brian asked how long the work has been going on for and whether it was 
undertaken as a LACNIC initiative or a community demand.



Guillermo replied saying the work has been ongoing for five years, and it was 
mainly a LACNIC initiative but based on community demand. 



Brian commented that there are differences between the RIRs – why does LACNIC 
have this, why doesn’t RIPE? He said it was worth asking for opinions and 
asked whether it was something people would find useful in the RIPE region.



Ruediger said he was surprised that a member of the global CSIRT community in 
Europe feels that this community doesn’t provide points of contact. His 
impression was that the CSIRT community was quite well-organised, but that they 
usually don’t show up in large numbers and contribute to this working group. 
He said that he didn’t use their services much and would actually appreciate 
it if the CSIRT community interacted with them a bit more. 



On the other hand, he added that a clear division of labour and clear focus of 
purpose for organisations makes sense. The kind of detailed incident follow-up 
and identification is not on the plate for the registry system. Things have 
worked differently in Latin America because the establishment of LACNIC took 
place in a very different way from how RIPE was founded 30 years ago and the 
demands on the people driving LACNIC are different from what is happening in 
Europe.



Brian said that this was a question for the community. We have done things here 
in a certain manner for a long time. The main activity of the NCC for a long 
time has been the maintaining registry, which is hugely important and still 
very valid. However, as the world changes and things change, the question is 
whether there are pieces that the community should look to, or the members 
should look to.



He pointed out that there are many new LIRs, many of whom are very small and do 
not have security people. Many of them are not large established European 
operators or telcos, which is something to consider. How much has the world 
changed? He asked how reflective the people driving RIPE, the RIPE community 
and membership for a long time are of the needs of the 10,000 LIRs we have 
gained in the last few years, or whatever the precise number was.



Carlos pointed out that that RIPE and APNIC have CSIRTs but they only account 
for RIR infrastructure. What WARP does goes beyond that and that’s a big 
added value that he saw. In the previous year there were 15 cases of reported 
hijacks to LACNIC. If you try to report a hijack to the RIPE NCC, nobody cares 
because they say RIPE NCC is a registry. Picking up on what LACNIC is doing 
right, there were 15 reports and they solved 14. 14 people were desperate, and 
their prefixes were being announced by someone else and they were helped. He 
would like to see the same coordination in this region, because the CSIRTs work.



Ruediger remarked that if he were to look into routing tables and browse 
monitoring systems, he would see multiples of 15 hijacks a day. It cannot be a 
task for the RIPE NCC to take care of all of them. The focus and the expertise 
used by the CSIRT community and routing security problems are very far apart. 
He could understand why when something was done successfully it clicks as a 
good thing, but understanding how to improve routing security is not so easy to 
get out of how CSIRTs work.



Carlos stated that the term is ‘routing security’ - you shouldn’t do 
routing security without the routing guys, or routing security without the 
security guys, it should be a mix.



Ruediger replied that he has worked in the IETF – there is a lot of stuff 
that has to be done there technically. RPKI was already created in the previous 
millennium, and ten years ago all the essential things were in place, we could 
have already deployed it. This is how slowly we are moving. He added that he 
was surprised that they bothered to figure out whether or not the hijacks were 
malicious because that doesn’t matter since you have to work on it regardless 
the damage is done.



Guillermo replied that he had said that it’s not easy or possible to detect 
whether or not it was malicious. They only process it and contact the 
organisation.



Ruediger commented that to actually proceed in network operation it was also 
irrelevant. It matters for damage claims and to the police, but it is not the 
first thought for network operators.



Brian asked whether Guillermo thought this could be replicated elsewhere.



Guillermo replied that in their case it was a demand from the community, so it 
grew naturally, from members who were sending reports and trying to contact 
other organisations, and asking LACNIC to do something. When they decided to 
build the WARP, it was LACNIC’s decision based on the community’s needs. He 
added that he didn’t know if it was the same in the RIPE region and it was 
for the RIPE community to decide.



AOB

Presentation available at: https://ripe79.ripe.net/archives/video/250



Brian opened up a discussion. He said in light of conversations around a WARP, 
more coordination or things like the task force in relation to the registry, it 
was worth asking whether the working group is doing the right thing. Are there 
other things they could be doing? 



Ruediger asked the group an open question - lots of small entities have joined 
the RIPE NCC and are around. What is this working group doing to provide help 
to them?



Brian said that it was an excellent question. He added that it’s not on the 
co-chairs to do all the work, they need people to write documentation. 
There’s a lot of very good information and experience out there in this 
working group that the RIPE community could benefit from. He asked what the 
working group was doing to pass on information to make sure people don’t have 
to reinvent the wheel, as governments, regulators and LEAs look at us more 
closely at our operations. They need to look at how people can help – 
documentation, how-to guides, etc.



He asked the group to please think about these questions and actions, and to 
think about what they would like on the agenda for RIPE 80 in Berlin. He 
reminded them to participate in the Community Plenary and the PC elections.

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