Recent Articles

 

Adding IPv6-only to DNS and Truncation in UDP

March 2024

We repeat the measurements of the behaviour of the DNS when processing truncated UDP responses, but this time we've constrained the measurement so that only IPv6-capable DNS resolvers are being measured. Does this make the results better or worse? More...

 


KeyTrap!

March 2024

Yet another DNS vulnerability has been exposed. The language of the press release revealing the vulnerabil;ity is certainly dramatic, with "devasting consequences" and the threat to "completely disable large parts of the worldwide Internet."" If this is really so devastating then perhaps we should look at this in a little more detail to see what’s going on, how this vulnerability works, and what the response has been. More...

 


Opinion: Digital Sovereignty and Internet Standards

March 2024

There is a view that Internet standards, and the IETF in particular, are at the centre of many corporate and national strategies to exert broad influence and shape the internet to match their own preferred image. This view asserts that standards have become the most important component of the Internet’s infrastructure. Due to their economic and strategic importance, the process of creation of internet standards are inevitably subject to the intense economic and political tensions between diverse world views. There are, naturally, other views, along the lines that the IETF does little other than reflect the more general pressures and directions being taken by industry actors, and has no ability to exert any leadership role in this space. More...

 


DNS and Truncation in UDP

February 2024

I’ll press on with another item within an overall theme of some current work in DNS behaviours with a report of a recent measurement on the level of compliance of DNS resolvers with one aspect of standard-defined DNS behaviour: truncation of DNS over UDP responses. More...

 


DNS OARC 42

February 2024

The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two to three times a year in a workshops format. The most recent workshop was held in Charlotte, North Carolina in early February 2024. Here are my thoughts on the material that was presented and discussed at this workshop. More...

 


DNS and the DELEG Proposal

February 2024

The DNS is a large-scale distributed database, where the internal structure of the databaase mirrors the hierarchical nature of the name space itself. In the database the points of delegation from one node to another are de noted by DNS Nameserver records. This structure has served the DNS adequately for many decades, so why change it? More...

 


IP Addresses through 2023

January 2024

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.More...

 


BGP in 2023 – BGP Updates

January 2024

The first part of this annual 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 table. BGP protocol behaviour in the form of dynamic routing updates are also part of this story. If the update rate of BGP is growing faster than we can deploy processing capability to match, then the routing system will lose coherence, and at that point the network will head into periods of instability. This report looks at the profile of BGP updates across 2023 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing. More...

 


BGP in 2023 – Have we reached Peak IPv4?

January 2024

At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet. The year 2023 marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. Not only is the Internet’s growth slowing down significantly, but in the IPv4 network it appears to be shrinking, which is unprecedented in the brief history of the Internet to date. More...

 


Models of Trust for the RPKI

December 2023

A report on a feasibility study looking at an alternative trust anchor structure for the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI). More...

 


Measurement and Analysis of Protocols at IETF 118

December 2023

At IETF 118 in November 2023 I attended the meeting of the Measurement and Analysis of Protocols Research Group, and here are my impressions from that meeting.More...

 


DNS at IETF 118

November 2023

The IETF met in Prague in the first week of November 2023, and, as usual there was a flurry of activity in the DNS-related Working Groups. Here's a roundup of those DNS topics I found to be of interest at that meeting. More...

 


Call the Routing Police!

November 2023

There is a continual stream of routing anomalies that are seen in today's Internet. Some are the result of operational mishaps, some are malicious and deliberate, but all of them have some impact. The latest routing mishap in Australia affected some 10 million customers when all their services, including telephony, IP, mobiles and fixed services all stopped. How can we enforce a set of requirements for service operators to do a better job? Where's the Routing Police to chase down these incidents and find out where poor operational practices are compromising the stability of the public Internet? More...

 


IPv6, the DNS and Happy Eyeballs

November 2023

If we are going to update RFC 3901, "DNS IPv6 Transport Guidelines," and offer a revised set of guidelines that are more positive guidelines about the use of IPv6 in the DNS, then what should such updated guidelines say? More...

 


How We Measure: RPKI ROA Signing and Route Origination Validation

November 2023

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here we will look at how we measure the adoption of the signing of Route Origination Attestations (ROAs) as part of the framework for securing inter-domain routing on the Internet using the digital credential framework provided by the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI).More...

 


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