Home»Documents»IAB Correspondence, Reports, and Selected Documents»2022»IAB Comments on A Notice by the Federal Communications Commission on Secure Internet Routing, issued 03/11/2022
On 8 April 2022, the IAB responded to the FCC’s request for comments on Secure Internet Routing:
IAB Comments on A Notice by the Federal Communications Commission on Secure Internet Routing, issued 03/11/2022 The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which provides oversight for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet and also handles the liaison management for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), appreciates the opportunity to submit comments in response to the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) Notice of Inquiry, “Secure Internet Routing”. The IETF is the main engineering organization that works on standards relating to Internet technology. The mission of the IETF is to produce relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet (RFC 3935). The IETF is an open, diverse, global community of developers consisting of network operators, vendors, researchers and many other stakeholders. The IETF originally developed the Internet protocol stack, including the Internet routing system based on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), and continues to be responsible for maintaining and evolving the technical specifications that define the Internet and its protocols. We believe the Internet’s success has resulted from its flexible, modular architecture. BGP is the central protocol for providing global connectivity across the world’s heterogeneous network domains to provide end-to-end global connectivity. It is fundamental to the operation of the Internet. As in any protocol development, the adoption within the industry of new capabilities will vary. In recent decades, with the increasing growth of the Internet, occurrences of BGP-related operational issues have increased. The existing BGP protocol stack is based on a design which can be extended, building on existing network investments. The IETF currently has two working groups dedicated to improving BGP interdomain routing, called Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) and Global Routing Operations (GROW). IDR is concerned with the correctness, robustness, and scalability of BGP. GROW is concerned with the consideration of the operational problems associated with global routing systems, including measurement, policy, and security. The IETF will continue to evolve the BGP protocol to meet the needs of new network structures and applications, with a strong focus on security. We believe in a continuous, modular, flexible evolution of the Internet and its protocols based on operational experience and requirements, where each service provider can determine their security needs based on their diverse requirements and in partnership with other providers. The success of future standardization efforts intended to increase routing security, we believe, will be highly dependent on educating BGP users about BGP operational issues and how well real-world deployment experience can be fed back into the multistakeholder standards development process, as opposed to a mandated top-down approach, which would fail to meet the diverse needs of the global community. The Federal Communications Commission can support the efforts of the Internet community to deploy mechanisms to secure global routing by supporting research and other work that help these communities to understand issues, develop solutions where needed, and deploy security technology more widely. The IAB believes that the IETF is an important partner in these efforts.