DNS at IETF 118

The IETF met in Prague in the first week of November 2023, and, as usual there was a flurry of activity in the DNS-related Working groups. Here’s a roundup of those DNS topics I found to be of interest at that meeting. Re-thinking the DNS Prior to IETF meetings there…


IPv6, the DNS and Happy Eyeballs

There was a draft that caught my attention during DNSOPS Working Group session at the recent IETF 118 meeting on the topic of “DNS IPv6 Transport Operational Guidelines”. This draft proposes to update an earlier guideline document with some new guidelines. The original document, RFC3901, titled “DNS IPv6 Transport Guidelines””,…


How We Measure: DNSSEC Validation

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here we will look at how we measure the adoption of DNSSEC validation. DNSSEC Security for the DNS has been a vexed topic for many years. The days…


Notes from OARC 41

OARC held a 2-day meeting in September in Danang, Vietnam, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations that were made that meeting. Deploying ZONEMD in the Root Zone As a distributed database, the DNS works through the piecemeal…


DNS is the new BGP

AUSNOG’23 was held in September. As usual, the meeting had a diverse collection of presentations on network technology, operational practices, engineering, and experiences. One of these presentations, by Cloudflare’s Tom Peseka, was on the subject of service routing, highlighting the ways in which today’s service platform attempt to optimise the…


Measuring the Use of DNSSEC

The canonical specification of the DNS that is normally cited are the pair of quite venerable RFCs, RFC 1034, “Domain names – concepts and facilities”, and RFC 1035, “Domain names – implementation and specification”, both published in November 1987. However, these two specification documents are just the tip of a…


DNSOP at IETF117

This is part of a personal commentary on the meetings at the July 2023 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF 117). If you want to know what was presented and the recordings of the sessions, see the IETF 117 meeting archive. After the flurry of work in various…


NXDOMAIN

The DNS is a strange and at times surprising environment. One could take a simple perspective and claim that the aim of the DNS is to translate DNS names into IP addresses. And you wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s also so much more. The DNS is also used as a…


OARC 40

OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting. Cache Poisoning Protection Deployment Experience In a world where every DNS name is DNSSEC-signed and every DNS client validates all received…


To DNSSEC or Not?

The early days of the Internet were marked by a constant churn of technology. For example, routing protocols came and went in rapid succession, transmission technologies were in a state of constant flux, the devices we used to interact with the emerging digital environment were changing, and the applications we…