Roskomnadzor has developed a draft order to create a trusted database of geolocation of IP addresses in Russia, which will contribute to the effective protection of domestic Internet resources from DDoS attacks. The corresponding draft order is posted on the portal of draft regulations.
The document amends the current order of Roskomnadzor dated July 31, 2019 No. 221; its public discussion began on January 15 and will end on February 2.
“The purpose of the order is to collect information about the country (geographic) affiliation of IP networks,” says the explanatory note to the bill. The order must come into force on September 1, 2024 and remain in effect until September 1, 2028.
According to the explanatory note, it is proposed to supplement the list of information submitted to Roskomnadzor by telecom operators, owners or other owners of technological communication networks, organizers of information dissemination on the Internet, as well as other persons who have a unique identifier for the totality of communications and other technical means on the Internet, with information about the network addresses they use, the location of use of the range of network addresses in accordance with information contained in the state address registry, or in the form of geographical coordinates and information about the purpose of use of the range of these addresses.
“Based on the data provided, a trusted database of geolocation of IP addresses in Russia will be formed. The database will be regularly updated, telecom operators and resource owners will be able to use it to automatically create correct access lists; its creation will make it possible to bring the digital border of the state into line with the physical borders of the Russian Federation. Citizens of Russia will have access to government, banking and other important resources anywhere in the country,” the explanatory note says.
It is also proposed to introduce an obligation to provide additional information about communication nodes “for a full analysis of information about communication networks and to determine the significance of communication nodes in the telecom operator’s network, the criticality of whose failure may affect the stability, integrity and functioning of the public communication network.”
Why is a trusted database needed?
As noted in the explanatory note to the bill, since 2022, the number and intensity of DDoS attacks on government resources of the Russian Federation has increased exponentially, and the attacks themselves began to lead to prolonged difficulties in the work or even inaccessibility of government and other socially significant information resources, which negatively affects society and business. At the same time, attacks mainly come from abroad, so to quickly set up protection against DDoS attacks from individual countries, telecom operators and owners of Internet resources create access lists based on data on the country of networks. “Information about the country of networks is taken, as a rule, from publicly available international information services. In a number of cases, an incorrect indication of country affiliation is established, which leads to blocking access to Internet resources for legitimate users,” note the drafters of the document.
Earlier, Sergei Khutortsev, director of the Public Communications Network Monitoring and Management Center subordinate to Roskomnadzor, said during the Spectrum forum that at the beginning of 2024, an information system will appear in Russia that will contain a trusted database of geolocation of IP addresses. As Khutortsev noted, foreign sources of data on the geographic location of network addresses are now the most popular, but they often contain incorrect data about individual regions of the Russian Federation. In this regard, in the first nine months of 2023 alone, Roskomnadzor recorded more than 400 requests from residents of new regions and individual regions of the Russian Federation who could not access Russian services due to incorrect databases of geographic IP addresses.
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