Randy Bush

Randy Bush is a Fellow at Arrcus, a routing software stack vendor, and a Research Fellow at IIJ, the first commercial ISP in Japan, where he lived for ten years.

He has over 55 years’ experience in the computer industry and has been a user and occasional implementer of networking from the ARPANET to the current day Internet. He architects and designs protocols, maintains a deep focus on security, measures and redesigns routing, and has consistently promoted rigour and simplicity in the Internet.

Thanks to Cisco, Cogent, Equinix, Evocative, Google, HE, Juniper, NTT, and others, he is also currently a lead maintainer of an informal research laboratory of three PoPs with routers, servers and clusters to facilitate permissionless research.

Recent Past

Starting in 2000, he worked on the design implementation of routing security protocols, notably catalysing the RPKI and Route Origin Validation design and protocols. He also spent a number of years at the CrypTech Project - an open source, hardware security module (HSM) design initiative.

Randy has been involved with the deployment and integration of appropriate networking technology in the developing world since the 1980s. He was a founder and an original principal for the Network Startup Resource Center, a US NSF sponsored pro bono effort.

He was the founding engineer at RAINet and Verio, later NTT, a global backbone provider from which he graduated in 2001. In 2012, he was among the first inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame. He received the Rob Blokzijl Award from the RIPE community in 2023, and has been honoured with several other awards.

Community Service

Randy has served on the RIPE Code of Conduct Team, the 2025 RIPE Chair Nominating Committee, and has co-chaired at least one RIPE Working Group.

He helped found and organise a number of operators' fora and RIRs including NANOG, AfNOG, AfriNIC, and ARIN. He has participated in the meetings and processes of all RIRs and many NOGs, and served on many program committees and technical conference organisations.

He spent many years in service roles for the IETF, chaired the DNS Working Group and served as the Ops Area Director. He also supported ISOC in organising the infrastructure for the ORG/NET domains.

Affiliated organisations: RGnet & RGnet OÜ, Arrcus, Inc., Internet Initiative Japan

Bush-Wenzel CP Trust, Abha Abuja Stichting

Number of affiliated LIRs: 1