History
In early 2014, a small group of network operators began working on a way to gather the wider operator community to improve the security and resilience of the global routing system. This eventually became an initiative we called the Routing Resilience Manifesto, and it produced a set of initial recommendations that we published as a draft document in July 2014 for community review and comment.
Once the community review and feedback period closed on 31 August 2014, we consolidated all the comments, updated the draft into the final version of the “Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS)” document, and officially launched the MANRS site with an initial list of supporters. (See the current document.)
We are extremely thankful to our original contributors who helped make this a reality. We encourage you to read the MANRS documents and show your support for the recommendations it contains.
MANRS was created by members of the network operator community. The Internet Society supported MANRS until January 2024, when the Global Cyber Alliance took on secretariat and operational functions. The Internet Society continues to provide funding, advocacy, and training via a five-year grant.
Original Contributors
These people were the main contributors to the initial draft document:
- David Freedman, Claranet
- Wesley George, Time Warner Cable
- Jason Livingood, Comcast
- Andrei Robachevsky, Internet Society
- Job Snijders, NTT
- Tony Tauber, Comcast
We would also like to thank Carlos Martinez, Jared Mauch, Danny McPherson, Christian O’Flaherty and other people we discussed this document with for valuable comments and suggestions.
Note: The organization/company affiliations are listed for information purposes only. The people listed participated as individual network engineers.
The Road to MANRS
Prior to this project the Internet Society had convened a series of roundtables and workshops that gathered network operators together to understand the problems and discuss potential solutions. Discussions on these topics were also taking place within operator groups in different parts of the world and within some routing-related working groups within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Reports of the Internet Society sessions can be found at:
- December 2011 – Routing Security: Report on 2nd Internet Society Operator Roundtable
- May 2012 – Routing Security: Report on 3rd Internet Society Operator Roundtable
- November 2012 – Routing Resiliency Measurements Workshop
Additionally, the Internet Society published the following briefing papers on this topic:
- July 2013 – Understanding Security and Resilience of the Internet
- December 2013 – Resilience of the Commons: Routing Security (see also a blog post)
The Internet Society also conducted a “Routing Resiliency Survey” in partnership with BGPmon in late 2013 and early 2014 to collect incident data related to routing resilience. The results were published in December 2014 and are available: Routing Resiliency Survey Report.
In 2015, the Internet Society published “Collaborative Security: An approach to tackling Internet Security issues” and views MANRS as a prime example of that approach.
Other Resources
Since officially launching MANRS in 2014, we have published several papers, reports, and resources.