Happy Birthday BGP

The first RFC describing BGP, RFC 1105, was published in June 1989, thirty years ago. By any metric that makes BGP a venerable protocol in the internet context and considering that it holds the Internet together it’s still a central piece of the Internet’s infrastructure. How has this critically important…


Report: DNS OARC 30 Meeting

DNS OARC held its 30th meeting in Bangkok on the 12th and 13th May. Here’s what attracted my interest from two full days of DNS presentations and conversations, together with a summary of the other material that was presented at this workshop. Some Bad News for DANE (and DNSSEC) For…


Report: ICANN DNS Symposium

By any metric, the queries and responses that take place in the DNS are highly informative of the Internet and its use. But perhaps the level of interdependencies in this space is richer than we might think. When the IETF considered a proposal to explicitly withhold certain top level domains…


DNS Privacy at IETF 104

From time to time the IETF seriously grapples with its role with respect to technology relating to users’ privacy. Should the IETF publish standard specifications of technologies that facilitate third party eavesdropping on communications or should it refrain from working on such technologies? Should the IETF take further steps and…


Expanding the DNS Root: Hyperlocal vs NSEC Caching

I guess that for me April has been DNS month, as here is another article on the Domain Name System. This time I would like to look at the efforts to expand the root zone service by enabling recursive resolvers. The root zone of the DNS has been the focal…


More DOH

It seems that the previous article on DOH has generated some reaction, and also there is some further development that should be reported, all of which I’ll cover here. The previous article on the reactions to DOH at IETF 104 can be found at https://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2019-04/angst.html. Default DOH First, with respect…


The State of DNSSEC Validation

Many aspects of technology adoption in the Internet over time show simple “up and to the right” curves. There are many examples, so to pick a classic curve Google’s measurement of IPv6 use is a good example. What lies behind these curves is the theory that once a decision is…


A quick look at QUIC

Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a network protocol initially developed and deployed by Google, and now being standardized in the Internet Engineering Task Force. In this article we’ll take a quick tour of QUIC, looking at what goals influenced its design, and what implications QUIC might have on the…


No!

What part of “No!” doesn’t the DNS understand? One effective form of attack on the authoritative DNS server infrastructure, including the root servers, is the so-called random name attack. If you want to target the online availability of a particular domain name, then a random name attack will attempt to…


BGP in 2018 – Part2: BGP Churn

The first part of this report looked at the size of the routing table and looked at some projections of its growth for both IPv4 and IPv6. However, the scalability of BGP as the Internet’s routing protocol is not just dependant on the number of prefixes carried in the routing…