Impressive sleuthing!

It's interesting to discover the reality that packet routing ends up following political affiliations. I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?

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toast0 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's interesting to discover the reality that packet routing ends up following political affiliations.

Certainly political affiliations have some influence, but also China and Russia have land borders with North Korea and are not at war. It's very common to run fiber optic on/under railroads and vehicle roads, so there you go. It's probably pretty hard to attract an international cable consortium to land in North Korea given everything, but terrestrial cabling is easier to start with anyway.

> I didn't know North Korea only has 1,024 IPv4 addresses. Do you know why so few IPs? How did they get them?

They would have asked APNIC, the Regional Internet address Registry for their region (Asia-Pacific). I can't find an assignment date, but 175/8 was assigned to APNIC in 2009. 2009 lines up with wikipedia reporting of the startup of the current ISP joint venture.

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monerozcash 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DPRK can certainly get however many IP addresses they want, DPRK just doesn't have that much infrastructure that they want externally accessible.

As far as I know, end-user traffic from within North Korea usually does not originate from those few IP addresses. Or at least not visibly so, they might be connecting to a proxy from a DPRK IP address.

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lukan 16 hours ago | parent [-]

"DPRK can certainly get however many IP addresses they want"

IP4 is quite limited as far as I know and not given out freely since a long time, or what do you mean here?

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protocolture 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Apnic used to hand out a /22 to most members. Its now a waiting list for 2 /24s. They would probably give some priority to a nation state over yet another mdu fibre isp.

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jauer 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IPv4 continues to be available to entities that have a need that fits a particular policy shape, just most people don't. Specifically, you can get IPv4 /24s for IPv6 transition purposes. This includes anycast DNS, MX, etc for legacy clients on other networks, v4-side of CGNAT, etc.

E.g. I was able to get a /24 in the ARIN region in 2021 and could justify 2 more for a _logical_ network topology similar to what NK presents to the world.

APNIC similarly has a pool available for IPv4 allocations: https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/#the-situati...

	▲	eqvinox 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		IPv4 is a question of money in almost all cases at this point. You can get what you can pay for.

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toast0 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

APNIC has some addresses [1] and will assign up to two /24s to qualified new accounts within the region. There are also carve outs for National Internet Registries and Internet eXchange Points.

[1] as of Nov 2025, approximately 3 million or a little more than 12,000 /24s https://www.apnic.net/manage-ip/ipv4-exhaustion/#how-to-tras...

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monerozcash 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

IPv4 is readily available and not very expensive. DPRK can just buy or lease them.