Autonomous system
AS8763 DENIC-AS Theodor-Stern-Kai 1
Unclassified RIPE
Summary
DENIC
infrastructure dns legacy
DENIC eG (DENIC-AS) — the cooperative that operates .de, Germany's country-code top-level domain and one of the largest ccTLDs in the world. The Theodor-Stern-Kai 1 in the worklist handle is simply DENIC's street address in Frankfurt, not a company name.
What it's used for
- Running the
.deregistry: the authoritative nameservers for the zone, the registry systems German registrars talk to, and DENIC's own corporate infrastructure. rDNS on the space names exactly that —gw-dns1.denic.de,rt-cix-wms.denic.de. - The whole inventory is one
81.91.160.0/20, roughly 4,000 addresses, plus an IPv6/32.
Notable
- Registry / DNS infrastructure has no honest kind here. It is not hosting, not an ISP, not an enterprise network in any useful sense — it is critical naming infrastructure, so it is deliberately left out of every classification bucket rather than forced into one.
- The shape backs that up: about 4,000 addresses against roughly 144 observed BGP neighbours. That inversion — tiny address count, enormous peering surface — is what anycast DNS looks like. The same small blocks are announced from many locations so that a resolver's query reaches the nearest instance.
- Nothing behind these addresses is an end user. Geolocating them to Frankfurt is correct for the organisation and misleading for the traffic.
Interesting
- DENIC is a cooperative (
eG), owned by its member registrars rather than by a company or the German state. Most large ccTLD registries are foundations, companies or government bodies; a member-owned co-op is unusual.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
Recorded at 2 exchanges in 2 countries, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| DE-CIX Frankfurt | Frankfurt, Germany | 80.81.192.37 |
| AMS-IX Amsterdam | Amsterdam, Netherlands | 80.249.209.22 |
Transit providers
25 upstream, 5 downstream and 53 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-13, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 7 prefixes · 3.84K addresses IPv6 30 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| DE | Germany | 37 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- RIPE
- Handle
AS8763- Registry name
- DENIC-AS
- Registrant
- DE-DOM
- Abuse contact
- abuse@denic.de
- Registered
- 2002-07-25
- Last changed
- 2026-02-18
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 5 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 6 authorising AS8763
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 5 of 5 announcements
- Route objects
- 12 naming AS8763
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 436 networks and 1,771 prefixes, as published 2026-10-13. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere