With IPv4 addresses running out in many regions, a company called GlobalResource Systems announced the existence of 56 million IPv4 addresses on January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, and 175 million by April 2021. The existence of IPv4 addresses has become a hot topic. Most of the new 175 million IPv4 addresses are also found to be under Pentagon control.
The IPv4 address in question was owned by the U.S. Department of Defense and has been on a long streak, but as posted in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) on January 20, 2021, it was placed under the control of Global Resource Systems, a Florida-based company. found that The 175 million number is equivalent to 6% of the world’s IPv4 addresses, and is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.
The announcement of the IPv4 address was determined to be by the Defense Digital Service (DDS) of the Department of Defense Procurement, and the DDS head said it had conducted a pilot activity to evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of the IP address space. However, the details of this pilot activity are unclear. It is also unknown why Global Resources Systems announced IPv4 addresses instead of the Department of Defense and DDS. In addition, a large number of IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared, such as rumors that the Pentagon sold some of the IP addresses owned by the Pentagon in line with Trump’s resignation, given that the time when the IPv4 address was released was hours before Trump resigned and President Biden took office. It has been released and is receiving a lot of attention.
On September 7, 2021, the Department of Defense announced to network administrators worldwide that it had placed 175 million IPv4 addresses under DoD control. An AS number called AS8003 was assigned to the IPv4 address in question, but if you check the RIPE NCC data that manages IP addresses, you can see that the AS8003 publisher was suspended on September 8, 2021.
According to a network monitoring company expert who was tracking the AS8003, he discovered that AS749, including most of the IPv4 addresses registered in AS8003, appeared on September 8, 2021. In line with this announcement, DDS also announced that the release of IPv4 addresses was planned from around the fall of 2020, and preparations began in mid-January 2021. To appeal to Biden’s inauguration time and the plan’s start time are irrelevant. However, it is not known what the pilot activity meant to evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of IP address space and what the Department of Defense was doing. Related information can be found here.