AS513

AS513 is registered under RIPE NCC to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the intergovernmental physics laboratory headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and best known for operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN's network history predates the modern commercial Internet in a specific way: the World Wide Web itself was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, and the laboratory later hosted the 2012 announcement of the Higgs boson discovery. AS513's own RIPE RDAP registration event is dated 2001-10-22, well after CERN's founding (1954) and the WWW's invention, so it should be read as a registry-record date rather than the origin of CERN's networking activity. Today the ASN announces a modest, stable footprint — 20 IPv4 prefixes (roughly 355,000 addresses) and 2 IPv6 /32 blocks — and sits at CAIDA AS-rank 3,294 with a customer cone of 7 ASNs. CERN operates its own IXP, CIXP, open to any ISP running BGP-4 with a public ASN, and maintains an open PeeringDB-listed peering policy with roughly five upstream transit providers (Cogent, Infomaniak, IP-Max, Sunrise, GEANT) supporting its role as the network backbone for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). No public abuse signal was found against AS513 as a routing source; separately, CERN's own security team has publicly documented CERN being a target of phishing and cryptomining compromises, which is a distinct fact from ASN-level abuse-source reputation.

Operator

CERN — European Organization for Nuclear Research (intergovernmental organization; RIPE org name "CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research") [Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/513, https://home.cern

Country / RIR

Switzerland (CH), RIPE NCC [Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/513

Allocated

2001-10-22 (RIPE RDAP autnum top-level registration event, 2001-10-22T15:20:40Z; corroborated independently by both the operator-research and routing-research angles, and consistent with bgp.he.net's WHOIS-created field); last changed 2022-02-17T12:19:18Z

[Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/513

Org status

Active intergovernmental organization — 25 Member States, 11 Associated Member States; AS513 status "active" in the RIPE registry [Confirmed] — https://home.cern, https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/513

Contacts

abuse@cern.ch (role group CERN NOC / CERN513); admin/tech contacts David Gutierrez Rueda and Edoardo Martelli; maintainers CERN-MNT and RIPE-NCC-LEGACY-MNT [Confirmed] — https://rdap.db.ripe.net/autnum/513

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found for AS513 as of 2026-07-10 — not present on the Spamhaus ASN-DROP list (live-checked; note the plaintext feed is deprecated in favor of a JSON version, so this is a weak negative), no NANOG archive hits, no ASN-specific hits in IPQualityScore/GreyNoise searches. Separately, CERN's own public Computer Security team has documented CERN being a target — e.g. a June 2019 phishing wave impersonating CERN group leaders and an October 2024 cryptomining compromise of a WLCG Tier-2 grid site — which is CERN-as-victim reporting, not an AS513 abuse-source finding, and is kept distinct here [Likely] — https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/asndrop.txt, https://home.cern/news/news/computing/computer-security-cern-has-been-phished-again

Network & routing

Network type

Non-Profit / intergovernmental research organization, not commercial (PeeringDB-listed); operates its own IXP, CIXP, since 1996 [Confirmed] — https://www.peeringdb.com/net/3365, https://cixp.web.cern.ch/

Size

20 IPv4 prefixes (~354,816 addresses announced) and 2 IPv6 prefixes (2001:1458::/32, 2001:1459::/32), matching between RIPEstat and bgp.tools; bgp.he.net independently reported higher counts (33 IPv4 / 10 IPv6), likely a stale or wider historical snapshot rather than the current live set [Confirmed for the RIPEstat/bgp.tools figures; range noted for the discrepancy] — https://stat.ripe.net/data/routing-status/data.json?resource=513, https://bgp.tools/as/513, https://bgp.he.net/AS513

Routing/peering

CAIDA AS-rank 3,294; customer cone 7 ASNs / 4,046 prefixes / 14,446,160 addresses; AS degree total 51 (6 customer, 40 peer, 5 provider). Upstreams per bgp.tools: Cogent (AS174), Infomaniak (AS29222), IP-Max (AS25091), Sunrise (AS6730), GEANT (AS20965/AS21320) — count of 5 corroborated by CAIDA's provider-degree figure [Confirmed for rank/cone/degree; Likely for the named upstream/peer list, single-source scrape] — https://api.asrank.caida.org/v2/restful/asns/513, https://bgp.tools/as/513

Peering policy

Open — no contract, ratio, or multi-location requirement (PeeringDB); CIXP is open to any ISP with a valid public ASN running BGP-4 [Confirmed] — https://www.peeringdb.com/net/3365, https://cixp.web.cern.ch/how-join

RPKI

Unclear/conflicting — bgp.tools reports full ROA coverage across all 22 announced prefixes; bgp.he.net reports a mixed 22-valid/13-invalid figure inconsistent with the current prefix count; RIPEstat's per-ASN rpki-validation endpoint requires a specific prefix and was not queried for an aggregate verdict [Unknown, honestly tagged rather than reconciled] — https://bgp.tools/as/513, https://bgp.he.net/AS513

Notable usage

Operates the Large Hadron Collider; birthplace of the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee, 1989); site of the 2012 Higgs boson discovery announcement; network backbone for the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) Tier-0 [Confirmed] — https://home.cern

Related ASNs

none independently confirmed by any angle; not asserted [Unknown]

Analyst note

Core registry facts (allocated date, name, status, RIR) are Confirmed by two independent angles reading the same RIPE RDAP autnum record plus routing-source corroboration. Prefix counts and RPKI posture show minor cross-source disagreement between RIPEstat/bgp.tools and bgp.he.net; the RIPEstat/bgp.tools figures were preferred as the more current, matching pair.