DNS DDOS

The recent attacks on the DNS infrastructure operated by DYN in October 2016 have generated a lot of comment in recent days. Indeed, it’s not often that the DNS itself has been prominent in the mainstream of news commentary, and in some ways this DNS DDOS prominence is for all…


NANOG 68

NANOG held its 68th meeting in Dallas in October. Here’s what I found memorable and/or noteworthy from this meeting. The meeting opened with Scott Bradner and a history of the IANA. Given that the arrangements with the US Government exercising some level of oversight on the IANA function lapsed on…


A Brief Potted History of the IANA

October 2016 marks a milestone in the story of the Internet. At the start of the month the United States Government let its residual oversight arrangements with ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) over the operation of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) lapse. No single government…


DNS OARC 25

DNS OARC is the place to share research, experiences and data primarily concerned with the operation of the DNS in the Internet. Some highlights for me of the most recent meeting, held in October 2016 in Dallas, were: DNS DDOS attacks: This presentation was about using an authoritative server exhaustion…


IPv6 and the DNS

The exhortations about the Internet’s prolonged transition to version 6 of the Internet Protocol continue, although after some two decades the intensity of the rhetoric has faded and, possibly surprisingly, it has been replaced by action in some notable parts of the Internet. But how do we know there is…


DNSSEC and ECDSA

Two years ago I reported on the use of the elliptical curve cryptographic algorithm in generating digital signatures for securing the DNS (DNSSEC) (http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2014-10/ecdsa.html). The conclusion at the time was hardly encouraging: “Will ECDSA ever be useful tool for DNS and DNSSEC? As good as ECDSA is in presenting strong…


DDOS Attackers – Who and Why?

Bruce Schneier’s recent blog post, “Someone is Learning How to Take Down the Internet”, reported that the incidence of DDOS attacks is on the rise. And by this he means that these attacks are on the rise both in the number of attacks and the intensity of each attack. A…


Labs retires the old ipv6-measurement graphs

As the stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 code has reached a stable service, we’ve decided to retire the old labs.apnic.net/ipv6-measurement/ tree of graphs. For people with saved URLs, it should redirect to the new service, and should map an ASN or Economy to the right dataset. For people who are farming the site for…


Binding to an IPv6 Subnet

by Joao Luis Silva Damas and Geoff Huston    In the original framework of the IP architecture, hosts had network interfaces, and network interfaces had single IP addresses. The list of active network interfaces, and the manner in which they acquire IP addresses, either by a static configuration or by…


IPv6 Performance – Revisited

Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other has deliberately chosen not to support IPv6, and the reason cited is not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an…