DNS OARC32a Meeting Report

Once the realisation sunk in that the lockdown response to the COVID-19 pandemic was not a short-term hiatus in our lives but a new normal, at least for a while, then a set of meetings and workshops have headed into the online space. For many years I have been a…


A DNS view of Lockdown

By Joao Damas and Geoff Huston   At NANOG 79 earlier this month Craig Labowitz from Nokia Deepfield presented on the impact on the COVID-19 pandemic on Internet use. The approach to the analysis used real time streaming telemetry from Communication Service Provider (CSP) backbone and aggregation routers and the…


New IP and Emerging Communications Technologies

A “New IP” framework was proposed to the ITU last year . This framework envisages a resurgence of a network-centric view of communications architectures where application behaviours are moderated by network-managed control mechanisms. It’s not the first time that we’ve seen proposals to rethink the basic architecture of the Internet’s…


RPKI and Trust Anchors

I’ve been asked a number of times: “Why are we using as distributed trust framework where each of the RIRs are publishing a trust anchor that claims the entire Internet number space?” I suspect that the question will arise again the future so it may be useful to record the…


The Wrong Certificate

I’m constantly impressed by the rather complex intricacies that are associated with running your own web server these days. A recent source of these complexities has been the PKI, the security infrastructure used to maintain secure connections over the network, and I’d like to recount my experience here, in case…


Insecurity

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about some issues with the Internet’s Public Key Infrastructure. In particular, I was looking at what happens if you want to “unsay” a public key certificate and proclaim to the rest of the Internet that henceforth this certificate should no longer…


Revocation

A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a system designed to support the use of public/private keyed digital signatures through a system of structured transitive trust. The objective of a PKI is to enable trusted communications between parties who may have never met and may not necessarily even know each other…


DNSSEC Validation (Revisited)

One year ago, I looked at the state of adoption of DNSSEC validation in DNS resolvers and the answer was not unreservedly optimistic. Instead of the “up and to the right” curves that show a momentum of adoption, there was a pronounced slowing down across 2017 and the first half…


Deep Sea Diving

Last month I attended the New Zealand Network Operators’ Group meeting (NZNOG’20). One of the more interesting talks for me was given by Cisco’s Beatty Lane-Davis on the current state of subsea cable technology. There is something quite compelling about engineering a piece of state-of-the-art technology that is intended to…


Addressing 2019

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. Back around 1992 the IETF gazed…