Pentagon retakes control of IP addresses it moved in last minutes of presidency

Because they paid to create it initially and have yet to sell their address space. There are some great stories early on that break down to: “Why are all these civilians on our network?”

swarnie2• 5 years ago

Because they can.

Who's going to take it off them?

mc32• 5 years ago

No because it was first come first served in addition to having sprouted from a government program.

Universities who got on the bandwagon first also tended to have multiple class B addresses.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

The highest bidder.. China.

Xorlev• 5 years ago

Back when IPv4 was enough for everyone, huge blocks of IPs were granted to corporations and governments.

est31• 5 years ago

Because the internet originated from a federal government project. The federal government of the USA also owns 28% of the land in the USA, means it owns 1.7% of the total land on earth.

Also, early owners got huge allocations. And the US government is an early owner.

nickthemagicman7• 5 years ago

Do you like this state of affairs having such a massive federal govt?

wrs• 5 years ago

The same reason Apple, Ford, and Bell Labs still have giant blocks — they got in at the beginning when allocation of 4 billion addresses seemed like a non-problem, and haven’t sold out.

https://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-add...

gjsman-1000• 5 years ago

Holy moly, Apple owns all of 17 . * . * . * (workaround for HN formatting)? Wow. That's over 16 million IP addresses. Fun.

merrywhether• 5 years ago

I think I found a way for the USPS to fund the pensions for all their future yet-to-be-born workers…

ajross• 5 years ago

"The internet", in the sense of the big TCP/IP v4 network we know today, was a DARPA-funded enhancement to the original ARPANET.

The Pentagon owns a big chunk of the internet because the Pentagon paid for the internet, basically. The more interesting bit is how much it they gave away for free, not how much it kept.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

We paid for the internet. The Pentagon is paid for by taxes.

CydeWeys• 5 years ago

It used to have control over 100% of them, so this is a big improvement.

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

The internet was created by DARPA.

eurasiantiger• 5 years ago

This can be independently verified by running a reverse DNS lookup, which asks the name server for a magic domain: 1.2.3.4 becomes ”4.3.2.1.in-addr.arpa”, which then yields NS records for the actual domains served from that address.

snowwrestler• 5 years ago

To address your edit, they still do because it doesn’t really matter. We have mitigated IPv4 exhaustion with NAT, and IPv6 adoption is still growing. No one cares enough to try to do anything about it.

If you made a list of “most popular concerns about the Internet in 2021,” the size of U.S. federal IP space would be pretty far down.

nickthemagicman7• 5 years ago

NAT has problems. It isn't the same as having an IP address.

IPV6 is the solution but has been in adoption forever.

I just don't understand what the government needs with all of those IP addresses and what kind of sneaky stuff it's doing behind the scenes.

count2• 5 years ago

They use a ton of it. Millions and millions of devices around the globe on a bunch of networks.

pbronez• 5 years ago

Defense Digital Service is pretty solid. I’m not worried about this.

kjaftaedi• 5 years ago

You don't wonder at all why they needed a private company?

BrianOnHN• 5 years ago

Cover story. As in the DDS is the cover story for how easy it is to do a money grab in the US gov.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

For tech & engineering specifically, sometimes used to get above the govt salary caps. But standard industrial complex profit maker makes sense too lol

Lammy• 5 years ago

I figured they just like it that way for the deniability, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Air_Transport

count2• 5 years ago

Solid at what?

programmarchy2• 5 years ago

Could this be related to the SolarWinds hack? Maybe the Pentagon was monitoring traffic to surveil vulnerable corporate infrastructure.

resoluteteeth• 5 years ago

Could you explain how this would work?

programmarchy2• 5 years ago

Not exactly but here’s some quotes from an article earlier this year [1]:

Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department's "many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated."
Expanding on his [Madory] point that the Defense Department may want to "scare off any would-be squatters," he wrote that "there is a vast world of fraudulent BGP routing out there. As I've documented over the years, various types of bad actors use unrouted address space to bypass blocklists in order to send spam and other types of malicious traffic."
On the Defense Department's goal of collecting "background Internet traffic for threat intelligence," Madory noted that "there is a lot of background noise that can be scooped up when announcing large ranges of IPv4 address space."

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/04/penta...

mfer• 5 years ago

I wonder if that company was a shell company setup by a 3 letter agency

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

That seems like a fairly dumb idea. The point of a CIA shell company is to hide the link to the government, isn't it?

GenerocUsername• 5 years ago

And here we are uncertain. what's your point again?

bwj982• 5 years ago

Under what circumstances can internal traffic leak to external addresses in 11.0.0.0/8? I’d have thought it wouldn’t have been routed via a gateway if the traffic is local.

0x0000000• 5 years ago

Routing decisions are made via route tables, which may include routes learned from different means: connected routes ("I have an interface in this network"), static routes, and routes learned from routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, et al). While any given routing protocol has it's own cost metric for selecting the best path, if a router has multiple routes to a network, learned from different means, there must be a way to select which route to install in the route table.

This can be tuned, but often goes in order of connected, static, external BGP, followed by internal BGP and other interior gateway protocols.

So, yeah if you learn a route from eBGP, you very well may take that path out of your own AS out to the global Internet, as opposed to internally where you are (incorrectly) using someone else's public space.

(Edit: network here includes a prefix length, where more specific prefixes are chosen over less specific ones. In the case, the public announcement is 11.0.0.0/8. If you were using this space internally, you would presumably have more specific routes than a /8)

EMM_386• 5 years ago

Is it possible this is cronyism?

Wasn't the US Government looking to sell these unused addresses to bring money in?

What if this secretive shell company is just something run by a great campaign donor or someone close to the administration who planned on a good cut of these profits?

It makes me very curious who is really behind this storefront in Plantation, FL.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

I'm willing to bet some money that, whoever they are, they play golf at Mar-a-Lago.

wmf• 5 years ago

The value of these addresses is peanuts to the DOD... although it would be a fortune if it made its way into someone's pocket.

IAmEveryone• 5 years ago

This would be my bet, as well. The company being registered in Florida also supports it, even if it’s not definitive.

People get thrown off by it being the Pentagon and come up with all these James-Bond-level theories. But DoD just happens to be the owner for historic reason.

sennight• 5 years ago

The company being registered in Florida also supports it, even if it’s not definitive.

Supports which baseless claim, that the orange Florida man paid kickbacks with ipv4 space? With a Florida registered foreign LLC pointing back to Delaware? Seriously?

lvs• 5 years ago

I don't really understand the premise of the article. There's no need to change control of an ip space in a registry to assign it to some piece of network hardware. The ownership change seems to serve no purpose under the offered explanation that its purpose was bulk collection.

betwixthewires2• 5 years ago

I was reading a thread on this site about the program and there was speculation that since these IPs are mothballed, lots of people use the address range for internal networks, particularly in China, and potentially this experiment was to get lots of networks worldwide to accidentally leak internal network traffic to the pentagon. Who knows what this thing was, but that sounds like something a government would do.

TwoNineFive• 5 years ago

Network engineer here with more than a decade of BGP peering experience on a T1 ISP: This theory is stupid for a variety of reasons. Doesn't even make sense if you understand how peering and routing actually works on the internet. This is Q-anon/ivermectin type conspiracy crap that only gets traction amongst the gullible.

Doxin• 5 years ago

Perhaps you'd care to explain why it's such a silly assumption?

hacker_newz• 5 years ago

Got a link? I've never heard of network engineers using an IP range because it's "mothballed".

betwixthewires2• 5 years ago

It was a thread on this site early this year where that was part of the discussion. I don't have one, and I'm not even saying it is true, just that I found that angle interesting.

Pentagon retakes control of IP addresses it moved in last minutes of presidency

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