With the recent IPv4 address exhaustion, many networks can no longer rely on requesting additional IPv4 addresses space. They resort to new ways to obtain addresses: buying and leasing. In this paper, we first shed light on the recent economic trends of the IPv4 buying market by augmenting transfer statistics with public and private pricing information from four large IPv4 brokers. We infer the size of the IPv4 leasing market through two different data sources: routing information observed from BGP collectors and RDAP databases operated by the Regional Internet Registries. We find that neither of those sources alone is capable of estimating the full market size. We relate our findings to discussions with 13 IPv4 brokers and summarize how networks handle their demand for obtaining IPv4 addresses in 2020.
Autonomous Systems (ASes) exchange reachability information between each other using BGP---the de-facto standard inter-AS routing protocol. While IPv4 (IPv6) routes more specific than /24 (/48) are commonly filtered (and hence not propagated), route collectors still observe many of them.
In this work, we take a closer look at those "hyper-specific" prefixes (HSPs). In particular, we analyze their prevalence, use cases, and whether operators use them intentionally or accidentally. While their total number increases over time, most HSPs can only be seen by route collector peers. Nonetheless, some HSPs can be seen constantly throughout an entire year and propagate widely. We find that most HSPs represent (internal) routes to peering infrastructure or are related to address block relocations or blackholing. While hundreds of operators intentionally add HSPs to well-known routing databases, we observe that many HSPs are possibly accidentally leaked routes.
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