Reserved Addressing

[Matthew G. Harrigan]

I was thinking about private vs. public inet address space the other day, and it occurred to me that with all the changing of authority with domain registrars and ip authorities, that some things are bound to get fuddled in the near future. For instance, right now it is the responsibility of the nic and a couple other core entities to delegate to the rest of the root-servers crowd not to route the 10.X's, 192.168.X's etc..., and if that responsibility expands past these few entities (especially seeing as how aquisitions are occurring right and left), there is obvious room for mistakes or confusion. We've all seen what happens when upstream ISPs fudge the routing tables, but I wonder what the impact would be if one of the newcomers decided to route 10.0.1.X at the same time another one did. I believe it's possible that packets could end up on someone else's private net given the appropriate fudging scenario. So what I'm wondering is ... among the firewall list folks, has anyone seen any anomalies of this nature, and if so, what are the responses that stateful inspection vs.  packet filtering give on unexpected WAN behavior?   Matt     Matthew G. Harrigan CTO, MCR http://www.mcr.com