Addressing 2013 – That Was The Year That Was

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2013 and what is likely to happen in 2014? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so lets see what has changed in the past 12 months in…


BGP in 2013

The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been toiling away, literally holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge of the Internet so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want…


MITM and Routing Security

If the motivation behind the effort behind securing BGP was to allow any BGP speaker to distinguish between routing updates that contained “genuine” routing information and routing updates that contained contrived or false information, then these two reports point out that we’ve fallen short of that target. What’s gone wrong?…


OECD and IPv6 – A Public Policy Perspective on IPv6

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, is a widely referenced and respected source of objective economic data and comparative studies of national economies and economic performance. The organization has a very impressive track record of high quality research and a justified reputation of excellence in its publications,…


Who Uses Google’s DNS?

Much has been said about how Google uses the services they provide, including their mail service, their office productivity tools, file storage and similar services, as a means of gathering an accurate profile of each individual user of their services. The company has made a very successful business out of…


IP Addresses and Traceback

This is an informal description the evolution of a particular area of network forensic activity, namely that of traceback. This activity typically involves using data recorded at one end of a network transaction, and using various logs and registration records to identify the other party to the transaction. Here we’ll…


Dotless

It was never obvious at the outset of this grand Internet experiment that the one aspect of the network’s infrastructure that would truly prove to be the most fascinating, intriguing, painful, lucrative and just plain confusing, would be the Internet’s Domain Name System.


The Big Bad Internet

I often think there are only two types of stories about the Internet. One is a continuing story of prodigious technology that continues to shrink in physical size and at the same time continue to dazzle and amaze us. We’ve managed to get the cost and form factor of computers…


Valuing IP Addresses

The prospect of exhaustion of the IPv4 address space is not a surprise. We’ve been anticipating this situation since at least 1990. But it’s a “lumpy” form of exhaustion. It’s not the case that the scarcity pressures for IP addresses are evidently to the same level in every part of…


Updating the Predictions of Exhaustion

It’s time I updated the IPv4 Address Report. For ARIN and LACNIC the time when the registry reaches into its collection of available IPv4 addresses and comes out empty handed is getting closer, and its time to sharpen up the modelling about exhaustion.