IETF IDR
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| IETF IDR | |
|---|---|
| Name | IETF IDR |
| Abbreviation | IDR |
| Formation | 1990s |
| Type | Working Group |
| Purpose | Inter-domain routing protocol development |
| Location | Various IETF meetings |
| Parent organization | Internet Engineering Task Force |
IETF IDR
IETF IDR is a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force responsible for development and coordination of specifications relating to inter-domain routing, particularly Border Gateway Protocol engineering. It interacts with standards bodies, research labs, network operators, and vendors to advance routing protocols deployed across the global Autonomous System topology, supporting infrastructure used by organizations such as ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC, and AfriNIC.
Overview
The working group engages with communities represented by IETF, IAB, IEEE, IETF Routing Area Directors, and operational bodies like NANOG, UKNOF, SANOG, MENOG, and PEERING to align protocol work with operational practice. Discussions reference protocol families originating from research at institutions including MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Bell Labs and consult implementations from vendors such as Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Huawei, Nokia, and Arista Networks. IDR outputs inform routing policy used by enterprises like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and content providers like Akamai.
History and Development
IDR evolved alongside landmark events and technologies: early inter-domain routing research following the ARPANET era, the adoption of BGP post-Routing Arbiter initiatives, and experiences from incidents such as the 2008 YouTube Pakistan outage and the 2009 YouTube hijack that underscored the need for secure route validation. The group built on precedent work from IETF Working Group (BGP), lessons from the CERT Coordination Center, and operational reports from RIPE NCC Routing Working Group. Key contributors include engineers and researchers affiliated with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, AT&T Labs, Bellcore, and consortia like IETF SIDR initiatives.
Protocol Specifications and Standards
IDR focuses on extensions and updates to the Border Gateway Protocol family, incorporating mechanisms originating from research presented at conferences such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, ICNP, INFOCOM, and SIGCOMM HotNets. Relevant standards reference work by groups including IETF SIDR, IETF DPRIVE, IETF RPKI, and documents influenced by the Resource Public Key Infrastructure community and registries like IANA. Specific protocol features draw on cryptographic primitives discussed at RSA Conference, Black Hat, Defcon, and from libraries maintained at OpenSSL, LibreSSL, and BoringSSL. Standards development coordinates with organizations such as IEEE 802.1, MEF, ETSI, and 3GPP when routing intersects with access technologies deployed by Verizon, AT&T, NTT Communications, Vodafone, and Deutsche Telekom.
Implementations and Deployments
IDR outcomes are implemented in network stacks and routing daemons maintained by projects like Quagga, FRRouting, Bird Internet Routing Daemon, and proprietary implementations from Cisco IOS XR, Juniper Junos, Arista EOS, Cumulus Linux, and MikroTik RouterOS. Operators from carriers such as Level 3 Communications, CenturyLink, Tata Communications, TeliaCompany, and cloud providers including Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner deploy IDR-guided features. Deployments are tested in laboratories at RIPE Atlas, PlanetLab, Emulab, and in peering ecosystems like AMS-IX, LINX, DE-CIX, Equinix, and IX.br.
Operational Procedures and Best Practices
IDR recommends procedures aligning with operational communities such as NANOG, RIPE NCC, APNIC training teams, and documentation from IETF RFC Editor archives. Best practices reference route filtering techniques used by Tier 1 ISP networks, prefix aggregation practices discussed at Routing Policy System workshops, and incident response coordination models inspired by FIRST and CERT/CC. Operational guidance considers monitoring toolchains that include BGPStream, ExaBGP, OpenBGPD, Bird, Zabbix, Prometheus, and telemetry systems discussed at IETF INT Area and IETF OpsArea meetings. Change control processes mirror methodologies from ITIL and incident playbooks from SANS Institute and US-CERT advisories.
Security Considerations
Security work within IDR closely interacts with initiatives like IETF SIDR, IETF RPKI, and operational security groups such as MANRS and NIST guidance on routing. Threats analyzed include prefix hijacking incidents similar to those documented by BGP Hijacking of YouTube, route leaks reported by Route Views Project, and vulnerabilities explored in publications from ACM CCS, USENIX Security Symposium, NDSS, and the IETF SAAG. Mitigations incorporate cryptographic validation, origin validation frameworks, and protocol extensions validated by software from OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and toolkits used by researchers at CERN, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.