Recent Articles
DNS is the new BGP
September 2023
One of the big changes within the Internet over the last decade or so has been the shift to replicated services. Service replication allows each individual service point to be positioned closer to clusters of users. The question now becomes who (and how) selects the "best" service point to use in response to each user's service request. It seems that in many cases the answer is the DNS, and not the BGP routing protocol. More...
Measuring the Use of DNSSEC
September 2023
It's challenging to measure the uptake of DNSSEC in the DNS. There are just so many aspects of the DNS that are occluded from view! How many DNS names are there in the DNS? How many of these are signed? How many queries are processed by DNS infrastructure? How many queries add DNSSEC validcation. We present a new measurement here which is a query-weighted view of the DNS, looking the amount of queries for DNS names that are DNSSEC-signed as a proportion of the total query load. More...
Chipping Away
August 2023
So far, the silicon technology at the heart of this revolution has been truly prodigious. The processes of assembling silicon wafers and the superimposition of tracks and gates has been the subject of continual refinement, and some 75 years after the invention of the transistor, we are now able to cram almost a trillion of them onto a silicon wafer not much bigger than a fingernail. Have we reached the end of this remarkable silicon road, or is there more to come? More...
DNSOP at IETF 117
August 2023
After the flurry of work in various aspects of DNS privacy, the IETF’s agenda for DNS has shifted towards more maintenance and update. This does not mean that the volume of work has abated in any way, but it has dropped the more focussed stance of previous meetings to a broader diversity of topics in operating DNS infrastructure. More...
IEPG at IETF 117
August 2023
The IEPG meets for a couple of hours before each IETF meeting. It's a somewhat eclectic collection of presentations, with some vague common thread of relevance to Internet operations. Here's a summary of my impression from these IEPG session presentations for IETF 117 More...
On Centrality and Fragmentation
July 2023
There seem to be two dominant themes in the enumeration of potential perils that face the Internet these days, and oddly enough they seem to me to be opposite in nature. More...
NXDOMAIN
July 2023
The DNS is a strange and at times surprising environment. One could take a simple perspective and claim that the aim of the DNS is to translate DNS names into IP addresses. And you wouldn’t be wrong, but it's also so much more. Most of the time when we analyse the behaviour of the DNS we look at the way in which names are resolved by the DNS infrasdtructure, but there is also another view of the DNS. What do we see when we look at DNS queries for names that do not exist in the DNS? More...
Happy 50th Birthday Ethernet!
June 2023
Some 50 years ago, at the Palo Alto Research Centre of that renowned photocopier company Xerox, a revolutionary approach to local digital networks was born. On the 22nd of May 1973 Bob Metcalf authored a memo that described "X-Wire", a 3Mbps common bus office network system developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). There are very few networking technologies from the early 70's that have proved to be so resilient (TCP/IP is the only other major networking technology from that era that I can recall), so it’s worth looking at Ethernet a little closer in order to see why it has enjoyed such an unusual longevity. More...
A Further Update on IPv6 Extension Headers
June 2023
This is a report on some further investigation of the IPv6 EH drop behaviour, extending the October 2022 APNIC Labs report on this topic. More...
RIPE 86 Bites – Encryption and Active Network Management
June 2023
RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format. Here’s the third of these bite-sized notes from the RIPE 86 meeting, on the topic of the implications of an encrypted content on active network management. More...
RIPE 86 Bites - What's the Time?
June 2023
RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format. Here’s the second of these bite-sized notes from the RIPE 86 meeting, on the topic of time. More...
RIPE 86 Bites - Gigabits for EU
June 2023
RIPE held a community meeting in May in Rotterdam. There were a number of presentations that sparked my interest, but rather than write my impressions in a single lengthy note, I thought I would just take a couple of topics and use a shorter, and hopefully more readable bite-sized format. Here’s the first of these bite-sized notes from the RIPE 86 meeting, on the topic of the Eu Gigabit Connectivity initiative. More...
Failed Expectations
May 2023
In a recent workshop I attended, reflecting on the evolution of the Internet over the past 40 years, one of the takeaways for me is how we've managed to surprise ourselves in both the unanticipated successes we've encountered and in the instances of failure when technology has stubbornly resisted to be deployed despite our confident expectations to the contrary! What have we learned from these lessons of our inability to predict technology outcomes? More...
The Internet as a Public Utility
May 2023
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of public utilities, operating in areas of public transit, postal services, water reticulation, electricity generation and transmission, and telephony services. In the past fifty or so years the position of public sector utilities has been eroded, with progressive waves of deregulation and liberalisation of these public utility services. The internet could be see as one outcome of the deregulation of the telephony sector. But how's this going? Should we rethink how we operate public utility functions and the Internet in particular? More...
The Internet Twenty-Five Years Later
April 2023
In 1998 any lingering doubts about the ultimate success of the Internet as a global communications medium had been thoroughly dispelled. The Internet was no longer just a research experiment, or an intermediate way stop on the road to adoption of the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) framework. There was nothing else left standing in the data communications landscape that could serve our emerging needs for data communications. IP was now the communications technology for the day, if not for the coming century. No longer could the traditional telecommunications enterprises view the Internet with some polite amusement or even overt derision. The Internet had arrived. More...
Notes from IETF116
April 2023
The IETF had its 116th meeting in Yokohama, Japan in the last week of March. Here’s some notes I made from some of the working group sessions I attended that I found to be of interest. More...
Hiding behind MASQUEs
March 2023
Privacy was a difficult topic for Internet protocols at the outset of the Internet. Things took a very different turn some 10 years ago following the disclosures of mass surveillence programs in the US, when the IETF declared that pervasive monitoring of users consititued at attack and Internet protocols needed to take measures to contain the way in which data was accessed in the network. The latest offerings in the area of improved privacy include Oblivious HTTP and MASQUE. Lets look at these approaches and the way that they attempt to contain the potential leakage of data. More...
Submarine Cable Resiliencey
March 2023
How do you protect a submarine cable from interference? Do you use more amour plating? Or laying the cable in a sea floor trench? Or simply lay more cables? Or do you head off into radio-based systems? More...
An Economic Perspective on Internet Centrality
March 2023
What sustains a digital monopoly in today's world? It's not the amassing of a huge workforce, or even having access to large pool of capital. It's not even the use of proprietary technologies that are not accessible to others. So why isn't the Internet fulfilling its vision of profound and intense competitive pressure in every part of the digital supply chain? Whjat is sustaining the domination of the digital world by a select group of behemoths? And, can we change this picture? More...
OARC 40
February 2023
OARC held a 2-day meeting in February, with a set of presentations on various DNS topics. Here’s some observations that I picked up from the presentations in that meeting. More...
To DNSSEC or Not?
February 2023
DNSSEC adds a digital signature to DNS resource records, allowing a client resolver to determine the authenticity of a DNS answer, if they so choose. You would think that by now, with a widespread appreciation of just how toxic the Internet can be, anything that allows a user to validate the response they receive from a DNS query would be seen as a huge step forward, and we would all be clamoring to use it. Yet the take up of DNSSEC has been less than enthusiastic. Why is this? More...
The Root Zone of the DNS Revisited
February 2023
The DNS is a remarkably simple system. You send it queries and you get back answers. However, the DNS is simple in the same way that Chess or Go are simple. They are all constrained environments governed by a small set of rigid rules, but they all possess astonishing complexity. More...
IP Addresses through 2022
January 2023
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 2022 - BGP Updates
January 2023
The first part of this 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. 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 second part of the report will look at the profile of BGP updates across 2022 to assess whether the stability of the routing system, as measured by the level of BGP update activity, is changing. More...
BGP in 2022 - The Routing Table
January 2023
This past year 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. The Internet’s growth is slowing down significantly. Have we got to the point of market saturation and there is no more demand capacity to fuel further growth? Or are we reeling from the combinations of a global pandemic, turmoil in energy markets and the signs of increased climate instability so that we are no longer as interested to throw more resources into more network infrastructure investment? Let’s take a look at the BGP view of 2022 and see how these larger economic and social considerations are reflected in the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system. More...
Is Secured Routing a Market Failure?
December 2022
The Internet largely operates in a space defined by markets rather than an intricate framework of regulation. Using a lens of market dynamics and looking at the level to which market-based incentives exist for actors, is the adoption of routing security heading in the direction of market failure? If so, then how should we respond? More...
The DNS at the IGF
December 2022
I was invited to participate in a session at IGF 2022 that was devoted to the workings of the DNS. I’d like to share my contribution to this session with my thoughts on where the DNS is headed. More...
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