Notes from NANOG 81

As the pandemic continues, the network operational community continues to meet online. NANOG held its 81st meeting on February 8 and 9, and these are my notes from some of the presentations at that meeting. A Brief History of Router Architecture Ethernet, developed in 1973 at Xerox PARC, was a…


Securing Routing Q&A’s

Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity at various network operator meetings to talk about BGP routing security and also highlight a measurement page we’ve set up that measures the extent to which Route Origin Validation (RoV) is actually “protecting” users (https://stats.labs.apnic.net/rpki). By this I mean we’re measuring…


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…


Why is Securing BGP just so Damn Hard?

Stories of BGP routing mishaps span the entire thirty-year period that we’ve been using BGP to glue the Internet together. We’ve experienced all kinds of route leaks from a few routes to a few thousand or more. We’ve seen route hijacks that pass by essentially unnoticed, and we’ve seen others…


Internet Economics

One year ago, in late 2017, much of the policy debate in the telecommunications sector was raised to a fever pitch over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in the United States. It seemed as it the process of determination of national communications policy had become a spectator…


Securing the Routing System at NANOG 74

The level of interest in the general topic of routing security seems to come in waves in our community. At times it seems like the interest from network operators, researchers, security folk and vendors climbs to an intense level, while at other times the topic appears to be moribund. If…