Apr 26, 2021 14:00:00

IPv4 addresses, which are said to be in short supply, suddenly appear in 175 million places. What happened?

On January 20, 2021, just minutes before Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States, 56 million IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared on the Internet's global routing table. This has caused a big stir as a large

number of IPv4 addresses that were supposed to have been exhausted in multiple regions suddenly appeared.

The Florida mystery of dormant Pentagon IP addresses - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/

The Mystery of AS8003 | Kentik
https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/

The cause of this confusion was a company called GlobalResource Systems, based in Florida, USA. When Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, the company announced 56 million IPv4 addresses owned by the Department of Defense and managed by GlobalResource Systems. GlobalResource Systems has since been regularly increasing the number of IPv4 addresses it manages, and at the time of writing this article, it has swelled to 175 million. This is equivalent to about 6% of the IPv4 addresses in the world, and is estimated to be worth several billion dollars (several hundred billion yen).

The IPv4 address published by GlobalResource Systems has been assigned the AS number 'AS8003'.

The graph below shows network operators ranked by the number of IPv4 addresses they own. Usually, the list is made up of major telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, but Global Resource Systems (GRS-DoD) owns far more IPv4 addresses than them.

Global Resource Systems' announcement of the Department of Defense's IPv4 addresses was made quietly on BGP . These IPv4 addresses had been dormant for a long time, but were announced to network administrators as being able to accept traffic. The sudden announcement of a large number of IPv4 addresses led The Washington Post to report that 'this is the most dramatic change in IP address space since BGP was introduced in the 1980s.'

'Global Resource Systems has released more IP address space than ever before in the history of the Internet,' said Doug Madry, director of analysis at kentik , a network monitoring company.

It is unclear why Global Resource Systems released so many IP addresses, but the timing of the announcement came just before Biden's inauguration as president, which led to rumors that the company may have sold off some of the IP addresses held by the Department of Defense when Trump stepped down.

However, it has been revealed that the announcement of the suspended IPv4 address was made by DDS, the Department of Defense's procurement arm. Founded in 2015, DDS plays a role similar to that of a Silicon Valley company within the Department of Defense, developing biometric authentication apps and solutions for encrypting information about COVID-19 vaccines.

Brett Goldstein, director of the DDS, said that the agency had conducted a pilot to advertise the DoD's IP address space. 'This pilot is designed to assess and prevent unauthorized use of DoD-owned IP address space. In addition, the pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities,' Goldstein said.

However, details about the effort are scarce, the DoD has declined to answer questions about the project, and Goldstein did not say why an unnamed Florida company released the IPv4 addresses rather than the DoD or DDS.

'All that's clear is that Global Resource Systems' announcement means a firehose of Internet traffic will be directed toward IP address space owned by the Department of Defense,' the Washington Post reported.