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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 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”.…
IETF 110 was held virtually in March 2020. These are some notes I took on the topic of current activities in the area of the Domain Name System and its continuing refinement at IETF 110. The amount of activity in the DNS in the IETF seems to be growing every…
For many years the consuming topic in DNS circles was that of the names themselves. If you wind the clock back twenty years or so you would find much discussion about the nature of the Internet’s name space. Why were there both generic top-level labels and two-letter country codes. If…
It’s an interesting topic of speculation to think about what form of network architecture would we be using if we were start afresh using today’s world of scalable content and service distribution as the starting point. Like the “clean slate” discussions of over a decade ago, if we were to…
Technical development often comes in short intense bursts, where a relatively stable technology becomes the subject of intense revision and evolution. The DNS is a classic example here. For many years this name resolution protocol just quietly toiled away. The protocol wasn’t all that secure, and it wasn’t totally reliable,…
The architecture of the Internet took a highly radical step in the evolution of wide area communications protocols. Rather than placing much of the functionality into the network infrastructure and using network functions to emulate reliable edge-to-edge circuitry, the Internet Protocol used a network service model that was minimal and…
The first part of this report on the handling of large DNS responses looked at the behaviour of the DNS, and the interaction between recursive resolvers and authoritative name servers in particular and examined what happens when the DNS response is around the Internet’s de facto MTU size of 1,500…
We’ve written a number of times about the issues of managing packet sizes in packet-switched networks. It’s an interesting space that is an essential part of the design of packet-switched networks, and a space where we still seem to be searching for a robust design. This work has been prompted…
We used to think of computer networks as being constructed using two fundamental common infrastructure components: names and addresses. Every connected device had a stable protocol address to allow all other devices to initiate a communication transaction with this device by addressing a data packet too this protocol address. And…
