By joining MANRS, China Telecom joins a global group of security-based organizations dedicated to making the global routing system more stable and secure.

FREMONT, CA: The Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) formally recognized China Telecom as a partner in the network operator scheme, reporting that three of China Telecom’s main networks met the community-led routing protection requirements.

By joining MANRS, China Telecom joins a global group of security-based organizations dedicated to making the global routing system more stable and secure. The MANRS project, sponsored by the Internet Society, was set up in 2014 by a multinational association of network operators. An increasingly growing ecosystem of network operators, Internet exchanges, content distribution networks, and cloud services are now taking the lead in reducing the most popular routing risks.

“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,” said says Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Senior Vice President, Strong Internet, Internet Society. “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.”

China Telecom started the process of entering MANRS a few years back. The organization has invested in dedicated infrastructure to track path leakage, hijacking, bogon AS and bogon prefixes, and introduced network-wide routing strategy optimization. Besides, in addition to Internet Routing Registry (IRR) based filtering, China Telecom has begun 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, 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 approved include AS4134, China Telecom’s leading backbone network, China Telecom’s (Global) AS23764, and China Telecom’s (Americas) AS36678. The remaining backbone networks of China Telecom, AS4809, are in the deployment process and are scheduled to follow the same requirements in 2021.