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In the world of public key cryptography, it is often observed that no private key can be a kept as an absolute secret forever. This does not mean that a private key remains a secret for a limited time and then the underlying cryptography spontaneously breaks apart and the key…
It seems that some things just never die, and this includes DNS queries. In a five month experiment encompassing the detailed analysis of some 44 billion DNS queries we find that one quarter of these DNS queries are zombies – queries that have no current user awaiting the response, and…
NANOG continues to be one of the major gatherings on network operators and admins, together with the folk who work to meet the various needs of this community. Their program committee produces a program that never fails to provide thought provoking interest. Here are my reactions to some of the…
We tend to make a number of assumptions about the Internet, and sometimes these assumptions don’t always stand up to critical analysis. We were perhaps ‘trained’ by the claims of the telephone service to believe that these communicaitons networks supported a model of universal connectivity. Any telephone handset could establish…
This is the long version of the blog post. A shorter version is available here. There is a graph I’ve been pondering for some time that illustrates the topic I’d like to look at in this article. Figure 1 – Number of Routes announced…
The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want to be seen, and the distributed…
One of the more difficult design exercises in packet switched network architectures is that of the design of packet fragmentation. In this article I’d like to examine IP packet fragmentation in detail and look at the design choices made by IP version 4, and then compare that with the design…
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2015 and what is likely to happen in 2016? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in…
The stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6 web has just grown a new feature: it can now account for the ASN contribution to an economies visible IPv6, when the ASN is not ‘resident’ in that economy. For most graphs, this doesn’t change much. But for some economies, its exposing the contribution of some significant ASN…
What’s in a name? that which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet;Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II What’s the difference between .local and .here? Or between .onion and .apple? All four of these labels are capable of being represented in the Internet’s Domain Name…
