Diving into the DNS

DNS OARC organizes two meetings a year. They are two-day meetings with a concentrated dose of DNS esoterica. Here’s what I took away from the recent 29th meeting of OARC, held in Amsterdam in mid-October 2018. Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 service Cloudflare have been running an open public DNS resolver service on…


DOH!

If you had the opportunity to re-imagine the DNS, what might it look like? Normally this would be an idle topic of speculation over a beer or two, but maybe there’s a little more to the question these days. We are walking into an entirely new world of the DNS…


Measuring the KSK Roll

When viewed as a network infrastructure, looks can be very deceiving when looking at the DNS. It appears to be a simple collection of resolvers and servers. Clients pass their DNS name resolution queries to resolvers, who then identify and ask an appropriate authoritative name server to resolve the DNS…


DNSSEC and DNS over TLS

The APNIC Blog has recently published a very interesting article by Willem Toorop of NLnet Labs on the relationship between Security Extensions for the DNS (DNSSEC) and DNS over Transport Layer Security. Willem is probably being deliberately provocative in claiming that “DoT could realistically become a viable replacement for DNSSEC.”…


Measuring ECDSA in DNSSEC – A Final Report

Back in 2014 I wrote on the use of the elliptical curve cryptographic algorithm in generating digital signatures for securing the DNS (DNSSEC). The conclusion at the time was hardly encouraging: “Will ECDSA ever be a useful tool for DNS and DNSSEC? As good as ECDSA is in presenting strong…


The Uncertainty of Measuring the DNS

The period around the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century saw a number of phenomenal advances in the physical sciences. There was J.J. Thompson’s discovery of the electron in 1897, Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis in 1900, Einstein’s ground-breaking papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric…


Measuring ATR

The Problem It’s pretty clear that the Internet has a problem. If you want to include Facebook’s misuse of personal information in ways that closely resemble unconstrained abandon, then the Internet probably has hundreds of millions of problems! More prosaically, lets confine our view of problems to the Internet Protocol…


Measuring the Root Zone KSK Trust

In September 2017 the proposed roll of the Root Zone Key Signing Key (KSK), scheduled for 11th October 2017 was suspended. I wrote about the reasons for this suspension of the key roll at the time. The grounds for this action was based in the early analysis of data derived…


Stuffing the Camel into the Bikeshed

“Bikeshedding” Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant. He postulates that they would spend the majority…


APNIC Labs enters into a Research Agreement with Cloudflare

APNIC Labs is partnering with Cloudflare for a joint research project relating to the operation of the DNS. I’d like to explain our motivation in entering into this research project, explain what we hope to be able to achieve with this work, and describe briefly how we intend to handle…