[anti-abuse-wg] Question regarding IP address abuse

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 02:59:29PM -0600, Kong Posh Bhat wrote:

> We are trying to develop an architecture that is based around the
> premise that there is a special purpose local HTTPS server with a well
> known address.  We intend to reserve the port number with IANA and
> define a well known local address in each of the following address
> spaces: 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0, 192.168.0.0, as well as in some private
> IPv6 address ranges.

the topics of service discovery, service location, zero configuration networking
and the like has been addressed in multiple ways, some of which have been
standardized within the IETF.  There might be a better starting point for
evaluating existing solution frameworks against your requirements than this list.

> One of my distinguished colleagues thinks that this constitutes an IP
> address abuse.  Is that so?  I do not seem to find any reference to this
> on the IANA Abuse FAQ site (http://www.iana.org/abuse/faq.html).   

Some people would probably agree with your distinguished colleague, but there
is a subtle difference between the "abuse" you quoted him mention and the
abuse this working group is addressing.
On the former - there is a reason some of the schemas mentioned above have been
developed.  For instance, you cannot be sure that the addresses you are trying to
probe are within the same administrative domain/realm and there is no
method to limit the scope of these packets.  Even though RFC 4085 "Embedding
Globally-Routable Internet Addresses Considered Harmful" aims at globally routable
addresses, similar logic is likely to apply.

This connects to the latter, network abuse as an operational phenomenon - see the
charter at <http://www.ripe.net/ripe/wg/anti-abuse/>.

-Peter