Network Working Group Y.

Rekhter

Request for Comments: 1918 Cisco Systems

Obsoletes:

1627

1597

B. Moskowitz

BCP: 5 Chrysler Corp.

Category: Best Current Practice D. Karrenberg

RIPE NCC

G. J. de Groot

RIPE NCC

E. Lear

Silicon Graphics, Inc.

February 1996

Address Allocation for Private Internets

Status of this Memo

This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the

Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for

improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

. Introduction

For the purposes of this document, an enterprise is an entity

autonomously operating a network using TCP/IP and in particular

determining the addressing plan and address assignments within that

network.

This document describes address allocation for private internets. The

allocation permits full network layer connectivity among all hosts

enterprises. The cost of using private internet address space is the

potentially costly effort to renumber hosts and networks between

public and private.

. Motivation

With the proliferation of TCP/IP technology worldwide, including

outside the Internet itself, an increasing number of non-connected

enterprises use this technology and its addressing capabilities for

sole intra-enterprise communications, without any intention to ever

directly connect to other enterprises or the Internet itself.

The Internet has grown beyond anyone’s expectations. Sustained

exponential growth continues to introduce new challenges. One

challenge is a concern within the community that globally unique

address space will be exhausted. A separate and far more pressing

concern is that the amount of routing overhead will grow beyond the

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capabilities of Internet Service Providers. Efforts are in progress

within the community to find long term solutions to both of these

problems. Meanwhile it is necessary to revisit address allocation

procedures, and their impact on the Internet routing system.

To contain growth of routing overhead, an Internet Provider obtains a

block of address space from an address registry, and then assigns to

its customers addresses from within that block based on each customer

requirement. The result of this process is that routes to many

customers will be aggregated together, and will appear to other

providers as a single route [

], [

RFC1519

]. In order for route

aggregation to be effective, Internet providers encourage customers

joining their network to use the provider’s block, and thus renumber

their computers. Such encouragement may become a requirement in the

future.

With the current size of the Internet and its growth rate it is no

longer realistic to assume that by virtue of acquiring globally

unique IP addresses out of an Internet registry an organization that

acquires such addresses would have Internet-wide IP connectivity once

the organization gets connected to the Internet. To the contrary, it

is quite likely that when the organization would connect to the

Internet to achieve Internet-wide IP connectivity the organization

would need to change IP addresses (renumber) all of its public hosts

(hosts that require Internet-wide IP connectivity), regardless of

whether the addresses used by the organization initially were

globally unique or not.

It has been typical to assign globally unique addresses to all hosts

that use TCP/IP. In order to extend the life of the IPv4 address

space, address registries are requiring more justification than ever

before, making it harder for organizations to acquire additional

address space [

RFC1466

].

Hosts within enterprises that use IP can be partitioned into three

categories:

Category 1: hosts that do not require access to hosts in other

this category may use IP addresses that are

unambiguous within an enterprise, but may be

ambiguous between enterprises.

Category 2: hosts that need access to a limited set of outside

services (e.g., E-mail, FTP, netnews, remote login)

which can be handled by mediating gateways (e.g.,

application layer gateways). For many hosts in this

category an unrestricted external access (provided

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via IP connectivity) may be unnecessary and even

undesirable for privacy/security reasons. Just like

hosts within the first category, such hosts may use

IP addresses that are unambiguous within an

enterprise, but may be ambiguous between

enterprises.

Category 3: hosts that need network layer access outside the

enterprise (provided via IP connectivity); hosts in

the last category require IP addresses that are

globally unambiguous.

We will refer to the hosts in the first and second categories as

"private". We will refer to the hosts in the third category as

"public".

Many applications require connectivity only within one enterprise and

do not need external (outside the enterprise) connectivity for the

majority of internal hosts. In larger enterprises it is often easy to

identify a substantial number of hosts using TCP/IP that do not need

Some examples, where external connectivity might not be required,

are:

- A large airport which has its arrival/departure displays

individually addressable via TCP/IP. It is very unlikely

that these displays need to be directly accessible from

other networks.

- Large organizations like banks and retail chains are

switching to TCP/IP for their internal communication. Large

numbers of local workstations like cash registers, money

machines, and equipment at clerical positions rarely need

to have such connectivity.

- For security reasons, many enterprises use application

layer gateways to connect their internal network to the

Internet. The internal network usually does not have

direct access to the Internet, thus only one or more

gateways are visible from the Internet. In this case, the

internal network can use non-unique IP network numbers.

- Interfaces of routers on an internal network usually do not

need to be directly accessible from outside the enterprise.

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. Private Address Space

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has reserved the

following three blocks of the IP address space for private internets:

10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)

172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)

We will refer to the first block as "24-bit block", the second as

"20-bit block", and to the third as "16-bit" block. Note that (in

pre-CIDR notation) the first block is nothing but a single class A

network number, while the second block is a set of 16 contiguous

class B network numbers, and third block is a set of 256 contiguous

class C network numbers.

An enterprise that decides to use IP addresses out of the address

space defined in this document can do so without any coordination

with IANA or an Internet registry. The address space can thus be used

by many enterprises. Addresses within this private address space will

only be unique within the enterprise, or the set of enterprises which

choose to cooperate over this space so they may communicate with each

other in their own private internet.

As before, any enterprise that needs globally unique address space is

required to obtain such addresses from an Internet registry. An

enterprise that requests IP addresses for its external connectivity

will never be assigned addresses from the blocks defined above.

In order to use private address space, an enterprise needs to

determine which hosts do not need to have network layer connectivity

outside the enterprise in the foreseeable future and thus could be

classified as private. Such hosts will use the private address space

defined above. Private hosts can communicate with all other hosts

inside the enterprise, both public and private. However, they cannot

have IP connectivity to any host outside of the enterprise. While not

having external (outside of the enterprise) IP connectivity private

hosts can still have access to external services via mediating

gateways (e.g., application layer gateways).

All other hosts will be public and will use globally unique address
 space assigned by an Internet Registry. Public hosts can communicate

with other hosts inside the enterprise both public and private and

can have IP connectivity to public hosts outside the enterprise.

Public hosts do not have connectivity to private hosts of other

enterprises.

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