Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

Thanks for sharing my site. Happy to answer any questions

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?

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.

"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?

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...