MANRS Fellows

The MANRS Fellowship Program offers highly motivated individuals an opportunity to be exposed to the mission and work of the MANRS initiative in international development. The Fellowship allows individuals to bring new perspectives, innovative ideas, and recent research experience into the MANRS work to improve routing security. Fellows work with Ambassadors – well respected routing security professionals – to improve their skills while working in a diverse environment.

MANRS Fellow Categories

There will be three (3) categories:

• Virtual/online Trainers
• Researchers
• Policy Analysts

Meet the experts who made up the 2021 and 2020 cohorts of our program.

Virtual/Online Trainers

Tasks

Prerequisites

Training   Conduct MANRS tutorials and trainings/workshops online Develop content for training and tutorials under the guidance of Ambassadors Help improve existing online tutorials and online labs Approach regional and national operator groups to understand their requirement for training Provide technical assistance and guidance to less experienced network operators   Promote MANRS   Generate MANRS awareness through word-of-mouth in local and regional communities Write content such as blog posts, newsletters, reviews, etc. related to MANRS Promote MANRS on social media Work closely with MANRS Ambassadors and coordinate with other Fellows in the category Allocate up to 6 hours per week to MANRS

Minimum 2 years working experience in the field, as part of the team managing a network Good working understanding of BGP Have conducted training either for RIRs or other community-based organization (e.g. NOGs)

Researchers

Tasks

Prerequisites

Technical research   Maintain a list of BGP hijacks, leaks and bogon announcements that impact the Internet significantly Collect relevant information on significant incidents such as route dumps to pinpoint the problem and identify the scale of it Write in detail about such incidents under the guidance of Ambassadors Review and test Network Operating Systems from different vendors to check their implementation of BGP Prefix filtering, SAV (Source Address Validation) and RPKI Promote MANRS   Provide in-depth reporting on the implementation of these functions from different vendors Share these reports with the community for further open discussions and provide feedback to vendors Write contents such as blog posts, newsletters, reviews, etc. related to MANRS Allocate up to 4 hours per week to MANRS

Minimum 4 years working experience in the field, as part of the team managing a network Good working understanding of BGP dumps Understanding of routing incidents Able to clearly communicate (in English) about these incidents

MANRS Fellows Researchers are invited to work in one of the following projects, or suggest their own, explaining how does the research project benefit the MANRS initiative and routing security.

ROA Historical Explorer

RIPE NCC maintains an RPKI repository for all Trust anchors (AFRINIC, ARIN, APNIC, RIPE, LACNIC) since 2011. This dataset contains certificates, ROAs, CRLs etc and is around 400Gb of size (https://ftp.ripe.net/rpki). The aim of this project is to create an API which can easily allow someone to lookup any prefix (and more specifics) and provides a list of ROAs covering this prefix within a date range. An additional part of this project is to create a lookup service to check the RPKI validity of BGP announcements in the past. The deliverables on this project would include:

• An API to allow prefix lookup in the historical dataset
• A feature that provides a list of historical BGP announcements and their RPKI validity
• A visualization of the above data using a time-series widget

MANRS Conformance Checker

MANRS is based around a set of actions that aim to address three main classes of problem around routing security. There are four actions: (Action 1) Prevent propagation of incorrect routing information, (Action 2). Prevent traffic with spoofed source IP addresses – Filtering, (Action 3) Facilitate global operational communication and coordination and (Action 4) Facilitate routing information on a global scale – IRR. This tool would periodically assess the conformance of MANRS participants to actions 1 and 4 and would provide details such as the list of BGP Hijacks operated by the MANRS participant in the last 3 months.

Blackholing Stats

One of the community services provided by Team Cymru is UTRS, where they provide a platform to share BGP Announcements for blackholing of prefixes. The scope of this is to share blackholing information between participants to reduce the impact of DDoS attacks. Participants can sign up, and can announce between /25 and /32 from their address space so that other participants can null route those.  The idea of this project is to create a series of public statistics on the announcements seen on the service. In more detail:

• The size of announcements;
• The coverage of such announcements with route{,6} objects or ROAs;
• Ranking of ASNs per announcement, per announcement size;
• Analysis of hijacks/routing incidents compared to null route announcements;
• Other stats that could be generated.

Policy Analysts

Tasks

Prerequisites

Analysis Review existing policy documents targeting Internet security, routing security, DDoS, and issues that can be addressed through MANRS actions Provide feedback on such policies Help improve existing policy documents for MANRS Promote MANRS Generate MANRS awareness through word-of-mouth in local and regional communities Write contents such as blog posts, newsletters, reviews, etc. related to MANRS Allocate up to 4 hours per week to MANRS

Basic understanding of how routing works and the concepts of routing security Experience in writing policy documents Experience in working with policy makers or on participation in different policy forums

If you have questions about this programme or the application process, please email [email protected] or refer to FAQ section.

Sponsorships

If you are interested in sponsoring the Program, please contact Sally Harvey at [email protected].