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Strengthening the Internet 13 February 2020

Let’s Improve Routing Security at APRICOT 2020

By Aftab SiddiquiSenior Manager, Internet Technology - Asia-Pacific

Internet builders in Asia-Pacific get together around this time every year at APRICOT to learn from each other and other leaders from around the world. Routing security will be a key theme, and we will be sharing in multiple sessions why the MANRS initiative is important to the global routing system.

Also called the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies, the conference is the largest meeting of the technical community in the region. It draws many of the world’s best Internet engineers, operators, researchers, service providers, and policy enthusiasts from over 50 countries to learn, share, and network.

Held annually, the ten-day meeting consists of workshops, tutorials, and conference sessions, birds-of-a-feather (BoFs) sessions, and peering forums all with the goal of spreading the knowledge needed to run and expand the Internet.

Technical training workshops will run from Feb 12 to 16, and the conference itself from 17 to 21 in Melbourne, Australia.

Our team at the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative will speak at various sessions throughout the conference, including the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) Deployathon on 17 February that I will facilitate. I will also be chairing the inaugural APNIC Routing Security/RPKI SIG on 20 February.

RPKI is a public key infrastructure framework that allows holders of Internet number resources to make verifiable information available about those resources, such as Route Origin Authorisations (ROA), essentially authenticated routing annoucements. RPKI uses a public key infrastructure that creates a chain of resource certificates allowing RPKI users to validate that a network announcing routes for specific Internet addresses actually is authorized by their regional Internet registry (RIR) to have those addresses. To learn more, please join us at the session.

We will also hold a MANRS Community Meeting on 20 February to get together with MANRS participants in the region. Join us if you are part of our growing community!

If you would like to learn more about or join MANRS, our team will be at our booth throughout the conference, so please come over to chat with us about the state of routing security of your networks. You may even get a MANRS T-shirt!

The wider Internet Society team will also be at APRICOT. Rajnesh Singh, Regional Vice-President, Asia-Pacific, will speak at APNIC Global Reports on 20 February with many of our partners.

We will hold an informal gathering with the community on 19 February, so if you are an Internet Society member or simply want to know more, please feel free to come by.

If you are interested in attending the conference you can still register at the event’s website. But if you cannot make it in person, you can also follow the sessions via livestream using the links on the session pages.


Image by Denise Jans via Unsplash

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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