DINR 2021

From the recent writeup of the DNS work at the IETF its clear that there is a large amount of attention being focussed on the DNS. It’s not just an IETF conversation, or a DNS OARC conversation, but a conversation that involves a considerable amount of research activity as well.…


IETF 112

Virtual meetings continue in the IETF, and the latest one was IETF 112 in November. Here’s my notes from some selected working group meetings that caught my attention. These cover some of the topics that are not directly associated with the DNS, as I’ve separately commented on the status of…


DNS at IETF112

Virtual meetings continue in the IETF, and the latest one was IETF 112 in November. Here are notes from some selected working group meetings that caught my attention. And, yes, I should say at the outset that the DNS continues to catch a lot of my attention these days, so…


NANOG 83

The network operations community is cautiously heading back into a mode of in person meetings and the NANOG meeting at the start of November was a hybrid affair with a mix of in-person and virtual participation, both by the presenters and the attendees. I was one of the virtual mob,…


RSA vs ECDSA for DNSSEC

It has often been said of technology standards that the good thing is that there are just so many to pick from! The same is true, to perhaps a more limited extent, in the world of cryptography. The choices may not be quite so diverse, but there are still many…


On DNS Openness

When we deregulated the telephone industry, we replaced these national monopolies and their vertically bundled structures with a collection of separate enterprises whose actions are orchestrated by market forces rather than by the dictates of the incumbent monopoly telco. This was a comprehensive upheaval to the telecommunications industry, and one…


Fifty Years On

When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970’s research work in packet switched networks was well underway and while it wasn’t running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was…


DNSSEC with RSA-4096 Keys

Let’s look at the operation of DNSSEC and its use of public key cryptographic algorithms. The DNSSEC specification does not define in advance which algorithm you should use to generate the digital signature records for a DNSSEC-signed zone. And that’s a very good thing. The issue here is that cryptographic…


Learning from Facebook’s Mistakes

It was only a few weeks back, in July of this year, where I remarked that an Akamai report of an outage was unusual for this industry. It was unusual in that it was informative in detailing their understanding of the root cause of the problem, describing the response that…


IAB Workshop on Measuring Network Quality for End Users

The telephone network had a remarkably clear overriding service objective: It had to sustain a human conversation. Now this must be able to carry a signal which is a human voice. To be discernible to human listeners, its necessary to carry audio frequencies of between 300 and 3,500 Hz. Most…