Dear DB-WG,

Speaking in individual capacity.

In RFC 2622 section 5 specifies the naming convention for AS-SET
objects. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2622#section-5.1
There basically are two styles:

    * "short" (example: AS-SNIJDERS)
    * "hierarchical" (example: AS15562:AS-SNIJDERS)

Problem statement
=================
In recent weeks a number of hypergiant cloud providers have faced the
thorny effects of adversarial AS-SET object naming collisions between
IRR databases.

An example of this phenomenon is the existence of AS-AMAZON in both RADB
and RIPE. According to https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1418 the RADB copy
of the object is the the correct one and populated with a number of
members entries. The RIPE one is empty, and not under control of Amazon.

The existence of the AS-AMAZON object in the RIPE database might cause
some operators to inadvertently apply empty prefix-filters to EBGP
sessions which in turn causes various problems.

It seems Amazon has no recourse to get the AS-AMAZON object removed from
the RIPE database; because the existence of that object in the RIPE
database does not violate any policies (as far as I know). But perhaps,
going forward, this community can do a little bit more to help prevent
similar situations from happening to others.

Solution proposal
=================
I think the solution is to - GOING FORWARD - disallow creation of new
AS-SET objects which follow the 'short' naming style.

The advantage of hierarchical naming is that the existing authorization
rules as applied by the RIPE Whois Server database engine do a decent
job of protecting/separating namespaces. 'Grandfathering' existing
short-named objects ensures that implementation of this solution
proposal causes minimal (if any) disruption to existing workflows.

The RIPE database engine blocking creation of short-named AS-SETs might
help nudge the industry towards making hierarchical naming the norm.

Related work
============
Related work throughout the registry industry: IRRd version 4 forces new
AS-SET objects to be structured hierarchically:
https://github.com/irrdnet/irrd/issues/408

Kind regards,

Job

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