AFRINIC staff participated at the just concluded AFPIF-10 Conference held in Mauritius. The event was attended by more than 350 people from across the world. AFRINIC was a sponsor of the event.
AFRINIC offered various speakers, namely Logan Velvindron, Amreesh Phokeer and Keesun Fokeerah. During his presentation, Logan told delegates that IETF work is underway on Explicit Congestion Control. This has gained traction after Apple enabled ECN on its products and their CDN network. Logan went through the ECN and the new extensions and highlighted reasons why operators in Africa should get involved. Logan also explained the works of cyberstorm.mu, and the contribution of the group to IETF hackathons.
Amreesh Phokeer and Keesun Fokeerah participated in the AFRINIC RPKI/IRR tutorial. They examined the BGP protocol and such vulnerabilities as route hijacking and route leaks. They explained the importance of protecting networks from route hijacks and preventing traffic towards networks being black-holed or intercepted. Amreesh and Keesun also discussed the need for a proper "routing security hygiene" by applying proper filtering such as not to leak routes beyond their intended boundaries. MANRS is a set of practices that could allow a network to protect itself and other networks from routing security issues. The team also talked about the AFRINIC Routing registry and gave details of how it can be used to document routing policies. Finally, they presented the RPKI platform that allows any AFRINIC member to sign their route authorisations. RPKI provides special x509 certificates that can be used as "proof of holdership" of resources to members and allows the creation of Route Authorization Objects (ROAs).
Fokeerah represented AFRINIC and MIXP at the AF-IX Meeting at AFPIF-10. What’s more, AFRINIC staff participate in a peering roadshow organised by the Internet Society and the Mauritius IXP in Mauritius, prior to the AFPIF Meeting on 11 July. The roadshow contributed to raise awareness on peering locally.
AFRINIC had a Member’s booth where hostmasters interacted with members present at AFPIF-10.