Allocation of the global IP address space is under the purview of IANA, who distributes management responsibility among five geographically distinct Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). Each RIR is empowered to bridge technical (e.g., address uniqueness and aggregatability) and policy (e.g., contact information and IP scarcity) requirements unique to their region. While different RIRs have different policies for out-of-region address use, little prior systematic analysis has studied where addresses are used post-allocation. In this preliminary work, we e IPv4 prefix registrations across the five RIRs (50k total prefixes) and utilize the Atlas distributed active measurement infrastructure to geolocate prefixes at RIR-region granularity. We define a taxonomy of registration ``geo-consistency'' by comparing a prefixes' inferred physical location to the allocating RIR's coverage region as well as the registered organization's location. We then apply this methodology and taxonomy to audit the geo-consistency of 10k random IPv4 prefix allocations within each RIR (50k total prefixes). While we find registry information to largely be consistent with our geolocation inferences, we show that some RIRs have a non-trivial fraction of prefixes that are used both outside of the RIR's region and outside of the registered organization's region. A better understanding of such discrepancies can increase transparency for the community and inform ongoing discussions over in-region address use and policy.

翻译：全球IP地址空间的分配由IANA负责，该机构将管理职责分配给五个地理上分散的区域互联网注册机构（RIR）。每个RIR都有权协调其所在区域特有的技术（如地址唯一性和可聚合性）与政策（如联系信息和IP稀缺性）要求。尽管不同RIR对区域外地址使用制定了不同的策略，但此前鲜有系统性研究分析地址在分配后的实际使用位置。在这项初步工作中，我们收集了五个RIR的IPv4前缀注册信息（总计5万个前缀），并利用Atlas分布式主动测量基础设施，以RIR区域为粒度对前缀进行地理定位。通过比较前缀推断的物理位置与分配RIR的覆盖区域及注册组织所在地，我们定义了注册"地理一致性"的分类体系。随后，我们应用该方法和分类体系，对每个RIR中随机选取的1万个IPv4前缀分配（总计5万个前缀）进行了地理一致性审计。尽管发现注册信息与我们的地理定位推断基本一致，但部分RIR存在相当比例的前缀既在RIR区域外使用，也在注册组织区域外使用。深入理解此类偏差可提升社区透明度，并为当前关于区域内地址使用及政策的讨论提供依据。