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The recent attacks on the DNS infrastructure operated by DYN in October 2016 have generated a lot of comment in recent days. Indeed, it’s not often that the DNS itself has been prominent in the mainstream of news commentary, and in some ways this DNS DDOS prominence is for all…
DNS OARC is the place to share research, experiences and data primarily concerned with the operation of the DNS in the Internet. Some highlights for me of the most recent meeting, held in October 2016 in Dallas, were: DNS DDOS attacks: This presentation was about using an authoritative server exhaustion…
The exhortations about the Internet’s prolonged transition to version 6 of the Internet Protocol continue, although after some two decades the intensity of the rhetoric has faded and, possibly surprisingly, it has been replaced by action in some notable parts of the Internet. But how do we know there is…
Two years ago I reported on the use of the elliptical curve cryptographic algorithm in generating digital signatures for securing the DNS (DNSSEC) (http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2014-10/ecdsa.html). The conclusion at the time was hardly encouraging: “Will ECDSA ever be useful tool for DNS and DNSSEC? As good as ECDSA is in presenting strong…
The DNS is normally a relatively open protocol that smears its data (which is your data and mine too!) far and wide. Little wonder that the DNS is used in many ways, not just as a mundane name resolution protocol, but as a data channel for surveillance and as a…
The design of IPv6 represented a relatively conservative evolutionary step of the Internet protocol. Mostly, it’s just IPv4 with significantly larger address fields. Mostly, but not completely, as there were some changes. IPv6 changed the boot process to use auto-configuration and multicast to perform functions that were performed by ARP…
DNS OARC held a two day workshop in Buenos Aires prior to IETF 95 at the end of March 2016. Here are my impressions of this meeting. For a supposedly simply query response protocol that maps names to IP addresses there a huge amount going on under the hood with…
In the world of public key cryptography, it is often observed that no private key can be a kept as an absolute secret forever. This does not mean that a private key remains a secret for a limited time and then the underlying cryptography spontaneously breaks apart and the key…
It seems that some things just never die, and this includes DNS queries. In a five month experiment encompassing the detailed analysis of some 44 billion DNS queries we find that one quarter of these DNS queries are zombies – queries that have no current user awaiting the response, and…
What’s in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II What’s the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet’s Domain Name…
