AS9858 KRNICNET Korea Internet Security Agency

AS9858 (KRNICNET) is held by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (한국인터넷진흥원, KISA), a public agency under South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT. KISA absorbed KRNIC, the Korea Network Information Center, in 2009. Through KRNIC it acts as South Korea's National Internet Registry under APNIC, allocating IPv4, IPv6 and AS numbers to Korean networks, and it runs the .kr ccTLD registry and the national CERT function.

What it's used for

This AS carries the registry's own infrastructure. RIS observes 19 IPv4 prefixes totalling 4,864 addresses, one IPv6 prefix (2001:c98::/32), and six BGP neighbours. The IPv4 announcement is dominated by a near-contiguous run of /24s out of 49.8.0.0 upward, with a handful of outliers (202.20.85.0/24, 192.132.15.0/24, 110.92.23.0/24). Announcing a block as many separate /24s rather than one aggregate is characteristic of an operator that deliberately segments its own space by service.

Six neighbours across under five thousand addresses is not a carrier. This is a well-connected but self-contained public-agency network, multi-homed so that services other networks depend on stay reachable: whois and RDAP for Korean address space, .kr domain registry systems, KRNIC's IP and ASN management portals, and KISA's security-response and reporting services. The /32 of IPv6 is notable in a batch where almost nothing else announces v6 at all, and is exactly what you would expect of the body that hands v6 out to everyone else.

Notable

• KISA is the NIR for South Korea, so registration data for most of the .kr-adjacent networks in this range traces back through it.
• One of very few networks in this ASN range announcing IPv6, which is fitting for the registry that allocates it.