[rpd] Subject: Fw: [Last Call] Draft Policy Proposal - Hierarchical Names for New AS-SETs (AFPUB-2026-ASN-001-DRAFT02)

[Taye Medoye]

Dear PDWG,

I have a separate concern regarding the ASN used as the hierarchical anchor.

The proposal assumes that placing an ASN at the beginning of an AS-SET name
makes the object globally unique and attributable to a specific resource
holder. However, the proposed text only requires the first element to
“consist of an ASN.” It does not expressly require that ASN to be globally
assigned, present in the authoritative AFRINIC database, or successfully
authenticated at creation.

That distinction matters because not every syntactically valid ASN
identifies a unique operator. Private-use ASNs are deliberately not
globally unique. Special-purpose, documentation, reserved, and unallocated
ASNs likewise do not provide the holder attribution on which the proposal’s
justification depends. RFC 6996, for example, reserves AS64512–AS65534 and
AS4200000000–AS4294967294 for private use.

The policy should therefore state explicitly that: the leading ASN must be
a globally assigned ASN with an authoritative aut-num object in the AFRINIC
database; creation must successfully authenticate against that object’s
authorised maintainer; private-use, reserved, documentation-only,
special-purpose, and unallocated ASNs must not be accepted as namespace
anchors; and the ASN must use the canonical ASPLAIN representation defined
by RFC 5396.

This cannot safely be left to unspecified implementation behaviour. IRRd
supports different authentication modes, including an opportunistic mode
under which the check may pass when the corresponding aut-num object does
not exist. The Impact Assessment does not identify which mode AFRINIC will
use or define the required failure behaviour across WHOIS, MyAFRINIC, and
API creation paths.

Without these safeguards, an AS-SET may satisfy the proposed naming syntax
while failing the very uniqueness and proof-of-control properties used to
justify the policy.

I therefore object to the proposal as currently written, and request that
the ASN eligibility and authentication requirements be made deterministic
before the proposal advances.

Regards,
Taye.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.afrinic.net/pipermail/rpd/attachments/20260727/00a3eee3/attachment.html>