> From: Danny McPherson <danny@xxxxxxx> > where's the authoritative source for who owns what prefixes This, one could imagining putting together. > and who's permitted to originate/transit what prefixes? This is a whole different kettle of bits. For one thing, there's no guaranteed-uniquely-definitive answer: entity A might have one idea of how it wants packets to flow from it to a given other entity B (say, 'don't use provider X because we despise them'), but entity B might disagree. Who should win that dispute? So the whole notion of 'allowed to transit' is a potential tussle space; mind, I'm not saying there always will be this sort of issue, but it's *possible*. Second, you're talking about potentially orders of magnitude more data: for each destination, there are worldwide likely hundreds (or more) of ISP's which are likely to be viable backbone transits. (By 'backbone transit', I mean ISP's/AS's which are not even directly connected to the organization which is the source or destination of the packets; e.g. customer A is connected to ISP p which is connected to ISP q which is connected to ISP r which is connected to customer B; q is a 'backbone transit'.) With ISP's which are directly connected with a customer, one can assume that there's an implicit authorization, but what about steps past that? If one further assumes that by p connecting to q, p is transitively authorizing q (with respect to A), then that can be done with straightforward (albeit complex and expensive) security on routing. However, if you go that way, then you lose the ability for A to make assertions about which q's are not acceptable. If you add that back in as a policy knob, then you're back to "potentially orders of magnitude more data". Noel _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf