Mind Your MANRS: Measuring the MANRS Ecosystem

Abstract

Mutually Agreed Norms on Routing Security (MANRS) is an industry-led initiative to improve Internet routing security by encouraging participating networks to implement a series of mandatory or recommended actions. MANRS members must register their IP prefixes in a trusted routing database and use such information to prevent propagation of invalid routing information. MANRS membership has increased significantly in recent years, but the impact of the MANRS initiative on the overall Internet routing security remains unclear. In this paper, we provide the first independent look into the MANRS ecosystem by using publicly available data to analyze the routing behavior of participant networks. We quantify MANRS participants’ level of conformance with the stated requirements, and compare the behavior of MANRS and non-MANRS networks. While not all MANRS members fully comply with all required actions, we find that they are more likely to implement routing security practices described in MANRS actions. We assess the relevance of the MANRS effort in securing the overall routing ecosystem. We found that as of May 2022, over 83% of MANRS networks were conformant to the route filtering requirement by dropping BGP messages with invalid information according to authoritative records, and over 95% were conformant to the routing information facilitation requirement, registering their resources in authoritative databases.