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The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the Internet’s inter-domain routing protocol, and after some thirty years of operation is now one of the more venerable of the Internet’s core” protocols. One of the major ongoing concerns related to BGP is its lack of effective security measures, and as a result…
Much has been said about the criticality of the small coterie of large-scale content distribution platforms and their critical role in today’s Internet. These days when one of the small set of core content platforms experiences a service outage then it’s mainstream news, as we saw in June of this…
The Swedish carrier group Telia has recently announced the sale of its international wholesale business to Polhelm Infra, an infrastructure investment manager jointly owned by a number of Swedish pension funds. Why would a telco operator sell off what was a core part of its operation to a pension fund?…
On the afternoon June 17 of this year there was a widespread outage of online services. In Australia it impacted three of the country’s largest banks, the national postal service, the country’s reserve bank, and one airline operator. Further afield from Australia the outage impacted the Hong Kong Stock Exchange,…
The world of cryptographic algorithms is one that constantly evolves. In part, this evolution is required by the nature of the process. The practical objective of these algorithms is not to pose a problem that is insoluble, but to pose a problem that is computationally infeasible. For example, a problem…
The IRTF is a research-oriented part of the larger IETF structure. It has a number of research groups, one of which, DINRG, is looking at decentralized Internet Infrastructure. That’s a big topic, and one could certainly look at distributed decentralized blockchain frameworks applied to ledgers, used by Bitcoin and similar,…
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Centre (DNS-OARC) convened OARC-35 at the start of May. Here’s some thoughts on a few presentations at that meeting that caught my attention. TTL Snooping with the DNS These days it seems that the term “the digital economy” is synonymous with “the surveillance economy”.…
One of the basic tools in network design is the so-called “stacked” protocol model. This model was developed in the late 1970s as part of a broader effort to develop general standards and methods of networking. In 1983, the efforts of the CCITT and ISO were merged to form The…
The world of IPv4 addresses is a relatively obscure backwater of the Internet. All that drama of IPv4 address exhaustion happened with little in the way of mainstream media attention. So it came as a bit of a surprise to see a headline in the Washington Post about IPv4 addresses.…
Committees should never attempt to define technology There always seems to be a point in the process where there is a choice between two quite different options, and there is no convincing case that one choice is outstandingly better than the other. Committees find it terribly hard to decide at…
