China Telecom Joins MANRS

Routing Security Best Practices Implemented Across Its Major Networks

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) officially accepted China Telecom as a participant in the network operator program, announcing that three of China Telecom’s major networks have met its community-led routing security standards.

“Through its efforts to join the MANRS initiative, China Telecom sets a positive example for other large operators who may be considering better routing security measures. MANRS worked closely with China Telecom engineers for over a year to implement the MANRS actions. The assessment of China Telecom’s networks has been thorough and deliberate, and we were impressed by their commitment to routing security and effectiveness in implementation.” –Joseph Lorenzo Hall Senior Vice President, Strong Internet Internet Society

By joining MANRS, China Telecom joins a global community of security-minded organizations committed to making the global routing infrastructure more robust and secure. Supported by the Internet Society, the MANRS initiative was created in 2014 by an international group of network operators. It is now adopted by a rapidly growing community of network operators, Internet exchange points, content delivery networks and cloud providers as the way forward to reduce the most common routing threats.

“Routing security events can critically disrupt the security and resilience of the global Internet and major global network operators continue to face challenges in mitigating these technical security issues – such as BGP route leaks and route hijacking. Through its efforts to join the MANRS initiative, China Telecom sets a positive example for other large operators who may be considering better routing security measures. MANRS worked closely with China Telecom engineers for over a year to implement the MANRS actions. The assessment of China Telecom’s networks has been thorough and deliberate, and we were impressed by their commitment to routing security and effectiveness in implementation. These efforts have paid off as we see a significant reduction of misrouting incidents on these networks in recent months,” says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Senior Vice President, Strong Internet, Internet Society.

China Telecom began the process of joining MANRS several years ago. The company invested in dedicated systems to monitor route leaks, hijacks, bogon AS and bogon prefixes, and implemented network-wide routing policy optimization. Furthermore, besides Internet Routing Registry (IRR) based filtering, China Telecom has started to drop all Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) invalid route announcements from its EBGP customers on these networks.

“It is a tremendous honor to be accepted into the MANRS community. Even though internally it is always clear to us that we are committed to providing the most secure and reliable networks for our customers, joining MANRS is an unequivocal demonstration to the outside world of that commitment”, said Xu Tan, President of China Telecom (Americas) Corporation (CTA). “I am particularly proud of the role CTA played in the process,” he added, “our presence and outreach in the U.S. created the conduit that connects the rest of the China Telecom to many of these international best practices.”

The three networks that are accepted today are AS4134, China Telecom’s main backbone network, China Telecom (Global)’s AS23764, and China Telecom (Americas)’s AS36678.

The remainder of China Telecom’s backbone networks, AS4809, is in the implementation process and expected to meet the same standards in 2021.

SOURCE China Telecom Americas