[ih] Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon's dormant IP addresses sprang to life

[Jack Haverty]

Another interesting question is Why.   Why is DoD now apparently
defending its address space after decades of quiescence?   What happens
next?

The history of Autonomous Systems might hold a clue.   Back circa 1982,
Bob Kahn asked me to figure out a way to enable the Internet to contain
routers built and managed by many different organizations.  I recruited
Eric Rosen and we came up with the notion of "Autonomous Systems", and
Eric documented EGP (the predecessor to BGP) as a way to begin
implementation and experimentation.

If you look at that 1982 EGP specification (RFC 827), it says

"It is proposed to establish a standard for Gateway to Gateway procedures
that allow the Gateways to be mutually suspicious."

The intent of EGP and ASes back then was to introduce a mechanism (EGP)
that would permit a variety of groups to build their own parts of the
Internet, being "mutually suspicious" of each other, but still able to
interoperate as a single Internet.   What it meant to be "mutually
suspicious" was left for each such group to invent and implement, with
the best idea(s), protocols, algorithms, et al gleaned from such
experimentation to be advanced as a standard for the Internet.

I didn't follow the subsequent decades of BGP et al, but AFAIK there was
little progress on developing techniques for implementing appropriate
"mutual suspicion", with occasional widespread Internet disruptions when
someone somewhere misconfigures something.

So, is DoD now attacking that issue?   Perhaps the DoD AS will become a
"Trusted AS" where such things as attacks on routing mechanisms are
prevented?   I can envision such an AS as a good place to host things
like power grids et al.

Or maybe they're just sprucing up their property in preparation for
selling that now scarce and valuable IPV4 address space...?

Or something else....

/Jack Haverty