IRR and ARIN-NONAUTH: How Do I Use It?
ARIN recently deployed IRR-online, our registry-integrated Internet Routing Registry (IRR) that’s available via our website. As a part of this process, we divided our published IRR data into two sources (also called “streams”), ARIN and ARIN-NONAUTH.
Source: ARIN
The first source (ARIN) is straightforward. This source contains routing information from organizations that have a signed Registration Services Agreement (RSA) with ARIN and has been validated as published by those authorized organizations. As an example, if you see the following object with ARIN as its source, you can be confident that object was published by an authorized registrant of that address space who has a contract with ARIN to maintain the registration of that space:
route6: 2001:db8::/32
descr: Example Core Route
origin: 65536
mnt-by: MNT-EXAMPLECORP
changed: janedoe@example.com 20181116
source: ARINSource: ARIN-NONAUTH
ARIN-NONAUTH is a bit trickier. Some customers assume that the NONAUTH part of ARIN-NONAUTH means “not authorized.” However, that’s not the case! NONAUTH means “not authenticated.” This source consists of data that either has been published by someone who cannot be verified as the registrant of the address space or who does not have a signed RSA with ARIN for maintenance of the address space. However, that doesn’t mean NONAUTH routing data should be ignored. On the contrary, it could be used as a valid source of routing data, albeit one that should be given lesser priority than more authenticated forms of routing data like the ARIN authorized IRR data source and Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI).
Using ARIN’s IRR data in routing decisions
Organizations using ARIN’s IRR data in their routing decisions are encouraged to obtain and use both ARIN and ARIN-NONAUTH data. When using ARIN-NONAUTH data, just make sure that if a better source of data–such as the ARIN IRR source or RPKI—doesn’t match data found in ARIN-NONAUTH, you use the better source. This will ensure the large amount of routing information in ARIN-NONAUTH continues to be available to make intelligent routing decisions. You can find more information about retrieving ARIN’s IRR data (from both the ARIN and ARIN-NONAUTH streams) on our IRR page.
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