Three Cheers for the 2022 ARIN Community Grant Recipients

By Amanda Gauldin – Project Manager

For the fourth year in a row, the ARIN Community Grant Program will be providing funding for projects that improve the Internet and make positive contributions to the Internet community in the ARIN region. We are pleased to share with you what our 2022 grant recipients will be working on this year:

Routing Security in the ARIN Region: Studying Trends, Facilitating Data Analysis, and Promoting RPKI Adoption DNS Research Federation | Oxford, United Kingdom | $17,000

Internet routing is a key building block of the Internet’s infrastructure that remains vulnerable to attacks. Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) has emerged as the leading strategy for securing BGP routing, though the technology has had a slow uptake worldwide, including in North America and the Caribbean. While multiple initiatives currently measure RPKI adoption and routing security, customized analysis and in-depth academic and industry studies remain challenging due to the complexity associated with data processing.

The goal of this project is to promote routing security in the ARIN region by showcasing data on route hijacks and RPKI adoption and encouraging greater academic and industry scrutiny over routing security practices. The project aims to leverage the Data Analytics Platform of the DNS Research Federation (DNSRF) to facilitate academic and industry data analysis on BGP routing, routing incidents, and RPKI adoption.

Project objectives are to:

• Produce a diagnostic report on the state of RPKI uptake and the impact of route hijacks in the ARIN region.
• Highlight trends and differences across countries in the RIR’s service region.
• Conduct an outreach campaign to disseminate report results.
• Encourage RPKI adoption and promote the use of the data analytics tool among key stakeholders.

Refactor and Upgrade ntpd’s Extension Field Handling
Network Time Foundation, Inc | Talent, OR, USA | Grant amount: $20,000

The NTP Project’s NTP software has been the gold standard for synchronized time since the 1980s. The NTP Project’s reference implementation used the “version 1 (v1)” layout of NTP Extension Fields. The NTPv4 Standard specified use of the “version 2 (v2)” Extension Field layout. Since the reference implementation used the v1 format for many years, prior to the the v2 format becoming the Standard, the code has not yet been updated.

To remain compatible with the huge number of deployed ntpd instances in the field, the reference implementation of NTP needs to have support for both the v1 and v2 extension field formats. This project aims to bridge this gap by upgrading the NTP codebase to also support the v2 extension field format. The project will implement, test, and document a carrier-grade improvement to ntpd’s extension field handling to pave the way for the implementation of NTS and other features that require NTP extension fields.

AS112 Project Website Improvements
DNS-OARC | Indianapolis, IN, USA | Grant amount: $7,500

The AS112 Project is a community-operated anycast deployment of DNS servers that primarily answers DNS queries for the RFC 1918 reverse DNS zones. The as112.net website is an information resource for anyone wishing to run an AS112 instance. The AS112 Project is instrumental in keeping this category of unwanted traffic from reaching the root or the in-addr.arpa servers operated by ARIN and other RIRs.

The website provides general information about the project, technical details about operating an instance, and a listing of known instances. The operator listing is manually edited HTML, requiring email notifications from individual operators to see updates. In its current state, the AS112 operator is difficult to use and obtain useful information. This project aims to update the information provided on the site with more recent developments and to update the site design so that information is easier to find and digest.

Applicant Appreciation

We appreciate the time and effort you put into applying, and we look forward to continuing to support operational and research projects that improve the overall Internet industry and Internet user environment, advance ARIN’s mission, and broadly benefit the Internet community within the ARIN region.

Program Impact

Since the program began, ARIN has funded 18 projects and reached thousands of individuals through the work of ARIN Community Grant projects. Just to name a few of the things they have accomplished so far, these projects have:

• Helped fund open-source tools that enable operators to better monitor their DNS infrastructure to manage IP address utilization across their networks.
• Educated senior enterprise technicians on IPv6.
• Allowed RSA signing with open-source hardware and software.
• Provided a free event management plugin for Network Operator Groups (NOGs) in the ARIN region (and beyond), saving hundreds of organizers administrative headaches.
• Extended rpki-client to support RRDP.

And much more work is in progress! Stay up to date with the project reports on the ARIN blog.

Future Grants

If you are interested in applying for a grant next year, look out for our call for applications to be issued in the spring of 2023. Information on how to apply will be posted to our ARIN Community Grant Program page, and we will send out an email via the arin-announce mailing list once the application period opens.

We look forward to continuing to make a positive and lasting impact on the Internet together.

Post written by:

Amanda Gauldin
Project Manager

Recent blogs categorized under: Grant Program

• Grant Report: Open Source RegCtl and PrefixCtl
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• Grant Report: NTP TCP Services Daemon
• Announcing the 2024 ARIN Community Grant Recipients