AS856

AS856 is an ARIN-registered autonomous system named NBREN and assigned to the University of New Brunswick, a Canadian research-and-education network operator, but it currently announces zero IPv4 and zero IPv6 prefixes and shows no active BGP peers — it is dormant in the global routing table as of an August 2026 check.

The name NBREN plausibly stands for New Brunswick Research and Education Network, consistent with UNB's listed membership in CANARIE, Canada's national R&E network, though no official page spells out the acronym. UNB's live, currently-announced address space — 131.202.0.0/16, 138.119.0.0/16, and 198.164.0.0/16 — is registered under a separate sibling ASN, AS6219, inside the same ARIN organization record (UNB-2-Z).

CAIDA ranks AS856 at 79,459 globally, with a customer-cone size of one ASN (itself) and zero cone prefixes — consistent with an allocated-but-unused number. Its ARIN RDAP autnum record's top-level events array carries only a "last changed" entry dated 2022-03-08; no top-level registration event is exposed, so no allocation date is recorded here. A live re-fetch performed during this research confirmed that gap is a genuine registry characteristic, not a data-parsing artifact.

RPKI posture cannot be evaluated because AS856 announces no prefixes, leaving nothing to validate against ROAs. No PeeringDB record exists for AS856 (404), and no official UNB/NBREN peering-policy page was located, so peering policy is Unknown.

Operator

University of New Brunswick (ARIN org handle UNB-2-Z; RIR-registered AS name "NBREN") [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/856, https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/UNB-2-Z

Country / RIR

CA, ARIN [Confirmed] — RIPEstat abuse-contact-finder (authoritative_rir: arin); RDAP registrant address Fredericton, NB, Canada

Allocated

Unknown — ARIN RDAP autnum top-level events[] contains only a "last changed" event (2022-03-08); no top-level "registration" event is present, confirmed via a live re-fetch on 2026-08-08 (not a parsing artifact) [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/856

Org status

ARIN org UNB-2-Z active; AS856 RDAP status "active"; record last changed 2022-03-08 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/856

Contacts

abuse/copyright acns@unb.ca (entity COPYR6-ARIN, group-kind role mailbox) [Confirmed]; technical/administrative/NOC POC, handle ZHANG191-ARIN — individual-kind vCard, withheld per policy, no reachable contact detail published; registrant address P.O. Box 4400, Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3, Canada

[Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/856

Security/abuse context (NEUTRAL, DATED)

no notable public abuse signal found as of 2026-08-08 — not in Spamhaus ASN-DROP, the NANOG mail-archive.com search (0 matches, mechanism verified functional), or bgp.he.net abuse annotations; coverage scoped to reachable sources since several reputation feeds blocked automated access [Likely] — https://www.spamhaus.org/drop/asndrop.json, https://www.mail-archive.com/search?q=AS856&l=nanog%40nanog.org, https://bgp.he.net/AS856

Network & routing

Network type

research-and-education (R&E) network; currently dormant/unannounced — UNB's active routing runs under sibling ASN AS6219 [Confirmed] — https://bgp.he.net/AS856, https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/UNB-2-Z

Size

dormant — 0 IPv4 prefixes / 0 IPv4 addresses and 0 IPv6 prefixes; CAIDA customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses [Confirmed] — RIPEstat routing-status / CAIDA AS Rank / bgp.he.net (2026-08)

Routing/peering

NOT announced — 0/327 RIS v4 peers and 0/322 v6 peers see it; CAIDA degree total 0 (customer 0, peer 0, provider 0); no upstreams visible in any source [Confirmed]. No PeeringDB record (404) and no official peering-policy page found

[Unknown] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS856, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/856, https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/856

RPKI

not assessable — AS856 announces no prefixes, so there are no ROAs to validate [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS856

Notable usage

AS name NBREN (plausibly New Brunswick Research and Education Network per naming pattern, not independently spelled out); UNB is a listed CANARIE member; UNB's active announced prefixes (131.202.0.0/16, 138.119.0.0/16, 198.164.0.0/16) run under sibling ASN AS6219, not AS856 [Confirmed for the AS6219 relationship; Likely for the NBREN acronym expansion] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/UNB-2-Z, https://www.canarie.ca/members/list/

Related ASNs

AS6219 (UNB's actively-announced ASN, same ARIN org record UNB-2-Z) [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/UNB-2-Z

Analyst note

AS856 (NBREN) is an allocated, active-status but currently dormant ASN registered to the University of New Brunswick; live UNB routing runs under sibling AS6219. No allocation date is recorded because ARIN RDAP's top-level events array for this autnum genuinely carries none, verified via a live re-fetch rather than assumed. Clean abuse profile across the sources actually reachable during this research.