APNIC Hackathon

The 5th APNIC Hackathon is co-located with APRICOT 2024/APNIC 57 in Bangkok, Thailand on Sunday, 25 February 2024 and Monday, 26 February 2024 at the conference venue.

The 1st APNIC Hackathon was held at APRICOT 2018/APNIC 45 in Kathmandu, Nepal, the 2nd at APRICOT 2019/APNIC 47 in Daejeon, South Korea, the 3rd at APRICORT 2020/APNIC 49 in Melbourne, Australia, and the 4th at APRICOT 2023/APNIC 55 in Manila, Philippines.

What are APNIC Hackathons?

APNIC Hackathons (hacking marathons) are events where a group of people work together on a predefined set of problems, intensively, for a period of a few days.

Mostly 'hacking' means coding, programming, and software development, but there can be other creative activities involved. Although a Hackathon could be competitive, the APNIC Hackathon will be a cooperative/collaborative activity, creating free and open-source products, you are not actually hacking any systems or software.

APNIC Hackathons bring together network operators, researchers, designers, students, developers, testers and maybe even experts in other areas (journalists, analysts, activists, lawyers, and so forth) who can also contribute through their experience and background, despite not having technical skills.

Attendance to the 5th APNIC Hackathon is free but limited to 30 participants.

Applications to participate are open to all APRICOT 2024/APNIC 57 attendees and others. Participants do not need to know a specific programming language or technology but must bring their own computer to the Hackathon.

Why participate

Network and socialize with other professionals
Exchange ideas and points of views about topics related to Internet measurements and infrastructure
Learn new skills

Participants will also receive a certificate of participation and a chance to win assorted prizes.

Who should apply

Informatics professionals (developers, testers, designers, and so forth)
Telecommunications professionals (networks/telecoms engineers, networks administrators/operators, and so forth)
Researchers working on Internet measurements, networking, or similar projects
Advanced students of technology degrees

Topic 1: RPKI ASPA validation and interoperability

Autonomous System Provider Authorization (ASPA) objects in the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) serve the purpose of verifying the AS_PATH attribute in the advertised routes of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). As part of this topic, participants will implement the ASPA verification algorithm and rpki-rtr (RPKI to Router Protocol). Although we intend to use the Rust language for the implementations, participants are welcome to use their preferred programming languages.

References:

Topic 2: APNIC registry API applications

The APNIC registry API provides the means for APNIC account holders to automate common options, like Whois updates, route management updates, and reverse DNS changes. As part of this topic, participants will write applications that interact with the API. For example:

Automating aggregation operations on routes
Bulk Whois contact detail changes
DNSSEC provisioning

Topic 3: Cross-RIR resource disposition analysis

The RIR all produce a daily statistics file called the 'delegated' statistics file or 'stats file', and a combined file is produced by the NRO. This process records the disposition of resources under each RIR. However, there are many ways to analyse this data, and combine it with information like the inter-RIR transfer log, the state of BGP, Resource Certification data, economic and geographic data. Some things are explicit, but others have to be inferred, for example the way different BGP speakers announce resources which are derived under different RIR policies or combine resources from several RIR and NIR. Or, the relationship of this data to GDP and Internet users.

The goal of this topic is to explore the kinds of 'business intelligence' (BI) which can be derived from this data and look at how we can improve understanding of where resources are delegated, and how they are being used. If you are comfortable writing code, there are jobs which may be a good fit for your choice of language. If you are not a coder, but comfortable in spreadsheets like Excel then there will be work to do here building spreadsheet friendly data and outcomes, and if you aren't comfortable in code or spreadsheets, then there are documentation and what-if and other tasks which could be done like charting and graphing, making this topic ideal for anyone who isn't a programmer. The goal is to improve understanding of how Internet Number Resources are being used and distribute into the world.

References:

Publishing projects

Participants must publish the source code they develop during the hackathon on GitHub under an OSI (Open-Source Initiative) approved license. GitHub Terms of Service are available.

In case participants do not have a GitHub account, their developed source code will be published by APNIC under a GNU General Public License.

If you are interested in participating in the 5th APNIC Hackathon, please register your interest here.

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