Diving into the DNS

If you are at all interested in how the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) works, then one of the most rewarding meetings that is dedicated to this topic is the DNS OARC workshops. I attended the spring workshop in Amsterdam in early May, and the following are my impressions from…


NANOG 63: The DDOS Conversation

In some ways the details of specific case of DDOS attacks are less material than the larger picture. The Internet always had the potential issue that the aggregate sum of I/O capacity of the edge was massively larger than the interior, and the sum of multiple edge outputs was always…


NANOG 63: BGP Route Hijacks

This presentation looked at a number of specific examples of route hijacking. The examples included: Network hijacking to support the creation of bitcoin farms and bitcoin mining via hijacked pool of servers, which, in turn, may use a hijacked pool of routes. The scope of a Canadian hijack was limited…


NZNOG 2015: Lets all run OpenWRT

Jed Laundry gave a brief impassioned call-to-arms. We need to stop expecting vendors to encode different systems and sell us different CPE when the actual need is for commonality, not difference. The way out is to push OpenWRT as a common standard with add-ons, and give the community a chance…


Best Practices in Operating a Secure Routing Environment

The Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the most critical components of today’s Internet. It’s the engine that ensures that when your application passes a packet into the network, the network is able to pass it onward to its intended destination. This routing protocol is the glue that…


Who’s Watching?

Much has been said over the past year or so about various forms of cyber spying. The United States has accused the Chinese of cyber espionage and stealing industrial secrets. A former contractor to the United States’ NSA, Edward Snowden, has accused various US intelligence agencies of systematic examination of…


ECDSA and DNSSEC

Yes, that’s a cryptic topic, even for an article that addresses matters of the use of cryptographic algorithms, so congratulations for getting even this far! This is a report of a an experiment conducted in September and October 2014 by the authors to measure the extent to which deployed DNSSEC-validating…


Five Objectives for Privacy and Security

It has been a very busy period in the domain of computer security. What with “shellshock”, “heartbleed” and NTP monlink adding to the background of open DNS resolvers, port 445 viral nasties, SYN attacks and other forms of vulnerability exploits, it’s getting very hard to see the forest for the…


The Cost of DNSSEC

If you’re playing in the DNS game, and you haven’t done so already, then you really should be considering turning on security in your part of the DNS by enabling DNSSEC. There are various forms of insidious attack that start with perverting the DNS, and end with the misdirection of…


A Reappraisal of Validation in the RPKI

I’ve often heard that security is hard. And good security is very hard. Despite the best of intentions, and the investment of considerable care and attention in the design of a secure system, sometimes it takes the critical gaze of experience to sharpen the focus and understand what’s working and…