Sep 13, 2021 19:00:00

It turns out that the U.S. Department of Defense has reacquired 175 million IP addresses that suddenly appeared before and after the resignation of former President Trump

As IPv4 addresses are depleted in multiple regions, a company called Global Resource Systems announced the existence of 56 million IPv4 addresses on January 20, 2021 when Joe Biden became the 46th President of the United States, 2021 It was a big topic that the existence of 175 million IPv4 addresses was revealed by April of the year. Newly, it has been revealed that the majority of the 175 million IPv4 addresses are under the control of the US Department of Defense.

Pentagon retakes control of IP addresses it had examined in final minutes of Trump's presidency --The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/10/pentagon-internet-protocol-addresses-trump/

Wait, Did AS8003 just disappear? | Kentik
https://www.kentik.com/blog/wait-did-as8003-just-disappear/

The IPv4 address in question was owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and had been dormant for many years, but was based in Florida as it was published on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) on January 20, 2021. It turns out that it is under the control of Global Resource Systems, an unnamed company that puts it. The number of 175 million is equivalent to about 6% of the IPv4 addresses in the world, and its value was estimated to be billions of dollars (hundreds of billions of yen).

The release of this IPv4 address has been found to be from the Department of Defense's procurement department, Defense Digital Service (DDS) , and DDS director Brett Goldstein evaluates the misuse of the IP address space. He states that he has conducted pilot activities to prevent it. However, the details of this pilot activity are unknown, and the reason why Global Resource Systems, not the Pentagon or DDS, announced the IPv4 address is unknown. Furthermore, since the timing when the IPv4 address was announced was a few minutes before the time when former President Trump retired and President Biden took office, 'When Mr. Trump resigned, a part of the IP address held by the Department of Defense The sudden release of a large number of IPv4 addresses attracted a great deal of attention, such as being rumored to have sold off.

Suddenly, 175 million IPv4 addresses were screaming for depletion, and what happened? --GIGAZINE

And on September 7, 2021, the Pentagon announced to network administrators around the world that it had placed 175 million IPv4 addresses under the Pentagon's control.

The IPv4 address in question

was assigned an AS number of 'AS8003', but when I checked the data of RIPE NCC , which manages the IP address, the publication of AS8003 stopped on September 8, 2021. You can see that.

Doug Madley , analysis director of network monitoring company Kentic, who was tracking AS8003, said that 'AS749' including most of the IPv4 addresses registered in AS8003 appeared on September 8, 2021. I am discovering that there is.

In addition, DDS said in line with this announcement, 'Publication of IPv4 addresses is planned from around the fall of 2020 and started in mid-January 2021 when preparations are complete,' said President Biden's inauguration time and the plan. It is appealing that the start time of is irrelevant. However, it remains unclear what the 'pilot activity to evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of the IP address space' meant and what the Pentagon was doing.