research-article

A first look at IPv4 transfer markets

Authors:

Ioana Livadariu,

Ahmed Elmokashfi,

Amogh Dhamdhere,

kc claffyAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '13: Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

Pages 7 - 12

https://doi.org/10.1145/2535372.2535416

Published: 09 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In February 2011 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) exhausted its free pool of IPv4 addresses, and the regional registries (RIRs) have started to run out of IPv4 addresses as well. As RIRs have started rationing allocations, IPv4 transfer markets have emerged as a new mechanism to acquire IPv4 addresses. Barring a few high-profile exceptions, IPv4 transfers have largely flown under the radar. In this work, we use the lists of transfers published by three RIRs to characterise the transfer market - the types of players involved, the sizes and characteristics of transferred address blocks, and the visibility of transferred address blocks in the routing table before and after the transfer. Next, we take first steps toward detecting address transfers using BGP data from the Routeviews and RIPE repositories from 2004-2013. We identify reasons why legitimate changes in prefix origin could be mistakenly inferred to be transfers, and implement a series of 10 filters that remove 86% of candidate transfers. Our results indicate that BGP-based detection of transfers is prone to false positives due to significant noise in BGP data, while some transfers remain undetectable as they involve non-BGP speakers. We describe some additional data sources and analysis techniques that may help reveal an opaque market for IPv4 address block transfers.

References

[1]

Archipelago Measurement Infrastructure. http://www.caida.org/projects/ark/.

[2]

IPv4 Market Group. http://ipv4marketgroup.com/home/.

[3]

University of Oregon Route Views Project. http://www.routeviews.org/.

[4]

ARIN Number Resource Policy Manual, 2013. https//www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html.

[5]

APNIC. APNIC IPv4 Address Pool Reaches Final /8. http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8.

[6]

APNIC. APNIC IPv4 Transfers. http://ftp.apnic.net/transfers/apnic/.

[7]

APNIC. APNIC Transfer, Merger, Acquisition, and Takeover Policy. http://www.apnic.net/policy/transfer-policy.

[8]

APNIC. Policies for IPv4 Address Space Management in the Asia Pacific Region. http://www.apnic.net/policy/add-manage-policy#9.10.

[9]

ARIN. Address Allocation and Assignment Reports. ftp://ftp.arin.net/pub/stats/.

[10]

ARIN. Inter-RIR and Specified Transfers of Internet Number Resources. https://www.arin.net/knowledge/statistics/transfers.html.

[11]

ARIN. Inter-RIR transfers. https://www.arin.net/resources/request/transfers_8_4.html.

[12]

I. V. Beijnum. Trading IPv4 Addresses Will End in Tears. Ars Technica, 2011.

[13]

I. V. Beijnum. IPv4 Address Transfer Markets are Forming where we Least Expected. Ars Technica, 2012.

[14]

X. Cai, J. Heidemann, B. Krishnamurthy, and W. Willinger. Towards an AS-to-Organization Map. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC, 2010.

Digital Library

[15]

L. Cittadini, W. Mühlbauer, S. Uhlig, R. Bush, P. Francois, and O. Maennel. Evolution of Internet Address Space Deaggregation: Myths and Reality. IEEE JSAC, Aug 2010.

Digital Library

[16]

K. Claffy. Exhausted IPv4 Address Architectures. CAIDA Blog, 2010.

[17]

K. Davies. IANA Update for CCTLD Registries, 2008.

[18]

A. Dhamdhere and C. Dovrolis. Twelve Years in the Evolution of the Internet Ecosystem. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 19(5), 2011.

Digital Library

[19]

A. Dhamdhere, M. Luckie, B. Huffaker, A. Elmokashfi, K. Claffy, and E. Aben. Measuring the Deployment of IPv6: Topology, Routing, and Performance. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC, 2012.

Digital Library

[20]

A. Dul. Economics of IPv4 markets on IPv6 deployment. NANOG 53, 2011.

[21]

G. Huston. IPv4 Address Report, 2009. http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html.

[22]

J. Heidemann, Y. Pradkin, R. Govindan, C. Papadopoulos, G. Bartlett, and J. Bannister. Census and Survey of the Visible Internet. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC, 2008.

Digital Library

[23]

B. Huffaker, K. Keys, M. Fomenkov, and K. Claffy. AS-to-Organization Dataset. http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as2org.

[24]

IANA. IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry. http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-addressspace.xml.

[25]

T. B. Lee. The Case for a Free Market in IPv4 Addresses. Ars Technica, 2011.

[26]

W. Lehr, T. Vest, and E. Lear. Running on empty: the challenge of managing Internet addresses. In Proc. TPRC, 2008.

[27]

M. Luckie, B. Huffaker, A. Dhamdhere, V. Giotsas, and K. Claffy. AS Relationships, Customer Cones and Validation. In Proc. ACM SIGCOMM IMC, 2013.

Digital Library

[28]

M. Mueller. Europe Pioneers IPv4 Address Transfer Markets. Internet Governance Project Blog, 2008.

[29]

M. Mueller, B. Kuerbis, and H. Asghari. Dimensioning the Elephant: An Empirical Analysis of the IPv4 Number Market. In Proc. TPRC, 2012.

[30]

Network World. Microsoft Pays Nortel $7.5 million for IPv4 Addresses, 2011.

[31]

E. Osterweil, S. Amante, D. Massey, and D. McPherson. The Great IPv4 Land Grab: Resource Certification for the IPv4 Grey Market. In Proc. HotNets-X, 2011.

Digital Library

[32]

RIPE NCC. Allocations from the Last /8. http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2010-02.

[33]

RIPE NCC. IP Address Allocation and Assignment Policies for the RIPE NCC Service Region. http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-553.

[34]

RIPE NCC. IPv4 Transfer Statistics. http://www.ripe.net/lirservices/resource-management/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers.

[35]

RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC Begins to Allocate IPv4 Address Space From the Last /8. http://www.ripe.net/internet-coordination/news/announcements/ripencc-begins-to-allocate-ipv4-address-space-from-the-last-8.

[36]

RIPE NCC. Routing Information Service (RIS), 2008. http://www.ripe.net/ris/.

Cited By

Streibelt FLindorfer MGürses SGañán CFiebig T(2023)Back-to-the-Future Whois: An IP Address Attribution Service for Working with Historic DatasetsPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_10(209-226)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_10
Fiebig TAschenbrenner DSileno GAbhishta ABecker C(2022)13 propositions on an internet for a "burning world"Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Joint Workshops on Technologies, Applications, and Uses of a Responsible Internet and Building Greener Internet10.1145/3538395.3545312(1-5)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3538395.3545312
Prehn LLichtblau FFeldmann AHan DFeldmann A(2020)When wells run dryProceedings of the 16th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3386367.3431301(46-54)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386367.3431301
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A first look at IPv4 transfer markets
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
    1. Network layer protocols
      1. Routing protocols

Recommendations

A fast and scalable IPv4 and 6 address lookup algorithm

Due to Internet's exponential growth in the last few years, we face two serious problems. First, the network becomes congested. Second, the number of IP addresses is not enough for distribution. For network congestion, we use fibers in the backbone of ...
A new location layer for the TCP/IP protocol stack

The IPv4 address space is quickly getting exhausted, putting a tremendous pressure on the adoption of even more NAT levels or IPv6. On the other hand, many authors propose the adoption of new Internet addressing capabilities, namely content-based ...
Mobile IPv6-based ad hoc networks: its development and application

The Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6)-enabled network architecture has recently attracted much attention. In this paper, we address the issue of connecting mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to global IPv6 networks, while supporting IPv6 mobility. ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '13: Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies

December 2013

454 pages

ISBN:9781450321013

DOI:10.1145/2535372

General Chairs:
Kevin Almeroth
UC Santa Barbara, USA
,
Laurent Mathy
Université de Liège, Belgium
,
Program Chairs:
Konstantina Papagiannaki
Telefonica Research, Spain
,
Vishal Misra
Columbia University

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 December 2013

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CoNEXT '13

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

CoNEXT '13: Conference on emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies

December 9 - 12, 2013

California, Santa Barbara, USA

Acceptance Rates

CoNEXT '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 44 of 226 submissions, 19%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 198 of 789 submissions, 25%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

9
Total Citations
View Citations
158
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)18
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 03 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Streibelt FLindorfer MGürses SGañán CFiebig T(2023)Back-to-the-Future Whois: An IP Address Attribution Service for Working with Historic DatasetsPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_10(209-226)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-28486-1_10
Fiebig TAschenbrenner DSileno GAbhishta ABecker C(2022)13 propositions on an internet for a "burning world"Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Joint Workshops on Technologies, Applications, and Uses of a Responsible Internet and Building Greener Internet10.1145/3538395.3545312(1-5)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3538395.3545312
Prehn LLichtblau FFeldmann AHan DFeldmann A(2020)When wells run dryProceedings of the 16th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3386367.3431301(46-54)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386367.3431301
Carisimo ESelmo CAlvarez-Hamelin JDhamdhere A(2019)Studying the evolution of content providers in IPv4 and IPv6 internet coresComputer Communications10.1016/j.comcom.2019.05.022145:C(54-65)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comcom.2019.05.022
Livadariu IBenson KElmokashfi ADhamdhere ADainotti A(2018)Inferring Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment in the WildIEEE INFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486223(2249-2257)Online publication date: Apr-2018
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486223
Dainotti ABenson KKing AHuffaker BGlatz EDimitropoulos XRichter PFinamore ASnoeren A(2016)Lost in Space: Improving Inference of IPv4 Address Space UtilizationIEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications10.1109/JSAC.2016.255921834:6(1862-1876)Online publication date: Jun-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2016.2559218
Moura GGanan CLone QPoursaied PAsghari Hvan Eeten M(2015)How dynamic is the ISPs address space? Towards internet-wide DHCP churn estimation2015 IFIP Networking Conference (IFIP Networking)10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2015.7145335(1-9)Online publication date: May-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/IFIPNetworking.2015.7145335
Golkar FDreibholz TKvalbein A(2014)Measuring and comparing Internet path stability in IPv4 and IPv62014 International Conference and Workshop on the Network of the Future (NOF)10.1109/NOF.2014.7119767(1-5)Online publication date: Dec-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/NOF.2014.7119767
(2014)IPv4 to IPv6Telecommunications Policy10.1016/j.telpol.2014.06.00838:11(1059-1068)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.telpol.2014.06.008

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents