What’s so special about 512?

The 12th August 2014 was widely reported as a day when the Internet collapsed. Despite the sensational media reports the following day, the condition was not fatal, and perhaps it could be more reasonably reported that some parts of the Internet were having a bad hair day. Media Reports about…


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…


Whats so special about 512K?

In around 1990 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was alerted to a looming problem: long before the Internet was a commercial reality it looked like we would hit two really solid walls if we wanted to make the Internet scale to a global communications system. The first problem was that…


Some Internet Measurements

At APNIC Labs we’ve been working on developing a new approach to navigating through some of our data sets the describe aspects of IPv6 deployment, the use of DNSSEC and some measurements relating to the current state of BGP.


NANOG 61

The recent NANOG 61 meeting was a pretty typical NANOG meeting, with a plenary stream, some interest group sessions, and an ARIN Public Policy session. The meeting attracted some 898 registered attendees, which was the biggest NANOG to date. No doubt the 70 registrations from Microsoft helped in this number,…


RIP Net Neutrality

It’s been an interesting couple of months in the ongoing tensions between Internet carriage and content service providers, particularly in the United States. The previous confident assertion was that the network neutrality regulatory measures in that country had capably addressed these tensions. While the demands of the content industry continue…


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…


NTP for Evil

There was a story that was distributed around the newswire services at the start of February this year, reporting that we had just encountered the “biggest DDOS attack ever”. This dubious distinction was as a result of the observation that this time around the attack volume got to 400Gbps of…


Protocol Basics – The Network Time Protocol

Back at the end of June 2012[0] there was a brief IT hiccup as the world adjusted the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard by adding an extra second to the last minute of the 31st of June. Normally such an adjustment would pass unnoticed by all but a small dedicated…


BGP in 2013 – The Churn Report

Last month, in January 2014, I reported on the size of the Internet’s inter-domain routing table, and looked at some projection models for the size of the default-free zone in the coming years. At present these projections are looking at relatively modest levels of growth of some 7 – 8%…