Randy Bush
lorenetworking
The operator who spent forty years helping other countries build their own networks, and who later went after the routing system's security.
He was in the inaugural Hall of Fame class, and not for inventing anything: the citation is for the Network Startup Resource Center, which began in 1988 as volunteering when engineers in Africa and Latin America asked for help getting connected. His account of the motive is unsentimental - there were capable scientists going out of date because they were isolated - and so is his description of the era: the internet then was scientists and non-governmental organisations, not social media.
The model was the important part. The centre works with local engineers who run their own infrastructure, supplying training, technical information and donated equipment rather than operating anything itself. That is the difference between building a network for somewhere and leaving one behind, and it is the same distinction the entry on Africa's connection turns on: what is scarce is rarely the technical work, it is the surrounding apparatus, and an outsider can either supply that permanently or help build it locally.
He did a great deal besides. He was Verio's founding engineer, chaired the IETF's DNS working group for a decade, sat on ARIN's founding board, and helped start NANOG and AFRINIC. From 2000 he turned to the question of whether the routing system can be trusted at all, catalysing the work that became RPKI - which is a fitting second act for someone who spent the previous decade helping people join a network on the assumption that its routing told the truth.
Also known as: bush, nsrc, network startup resource center, rpki
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: the NSRC started as a volunteer effort to support networking in southern Africa in 1988, when Bush designed, taught about, and helped deploy a multi-country network; it works with indigenous network engineers who develop and maintain infrastructure in their own countries, providing technical information, engineering assistance, training, and donations of books and equipment. He was a founding engineer of Verio and a founding board member of ARIN
- Internet Hall of Fame official biography: Research Fellow and Network Operator at Internet Initiative Japan, Japan's first commercial ISP, specialising in network measurement, routing, security and IPv6 deployment, and a lead designer of the BGP security effort; chaired the IETF DNS working group for a decade
- On the 1988 origin: engineers from Africa and Latin America began asking for help connecting, and in his account there were good scientists who were isolated and becoming out of date quickly; at that point, he notes, the internet was scientists and NGOs rather than social media