Autonomous system
AS9591 NIFS National Institute for Fusion Science
Education APNIC
Summary
National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS)
research education government legacy
AS9591 (NIFS) is held by the National Institute for Fusion Science, the Japanese national research institute at Toki in Gifu Prefecture. NIFS is the home of the Large Helical Device (LHD), a superconducting stellarator that has been confining hydrogen and, since 2017, deuterium plasmas as part of Japan's magnetic-confinement fusion programme. This is a single research site's network.
What it's used for
The routing evidence is short and telling: two IPv4 prefixes covering 65,536 addresses, which is the whole of 133.75.0.0/16 plus a more-specific 133.75.232.0/24, no IPv6, and two BGP neighbours. The 133.0.0.0/8 range is long associated with Japanese academic and research institutions, and holding an entire /16 is the mark of an organisation that received its allocation in the era when a national institute was simply given a class-B network. What matters is the contrast: 65,536 addresses against just two peers. This is not a carrier and not a hosting platform. It is a leaf site with an enormous historical allocation and a tiny routing presence, consuming transit through the Japanese research networking arrangements. The space carries what a fusion laboratory needs it to carry: experiment control and diagnostic systems around the LHD, the very large datasets those diagnostics produce, simulation and analysis clusters, and the institute's ordinary web, mail and staff services.
Notable
- The extra
/24announced alongside the/16is a routine traffic-engineering or dual-homing artefact, not a separate network. - NIFS runs graduate education in fusion science in partnership with SOKENDAI, so the network serves students and visiting researchers as well as permanent staff.
- The institute collaborates internationally on fusion experiments, which is part of why a research site of its size sustains its own AS rather than sitting inside a university's.
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
No exchange port on file. Many exchanges publish no participant list, so this is not proof of absence.
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 9 prefixes · 65.54K addresses IPv6 0 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| JP | Japan | 9 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- APNIC
- Handle
AS9591- Registry name
- NIFS
- Abuse contact
- hostmaster@nic.ad.jp
- Registered
- 1999-08-05
- Last changed
- 2019-09-17
- Allocation
- allocated
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 2 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 1 authorising AS9591
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 2 of 2 announcements
- Route objects
- 1 naming AS9591
Reputation
Classification and threat
Education University, school or national research and education network.
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