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DNSSEC - A Review
June 2010
After many years, the root of the DNS is evidently going to be
signed in the coming weeks using DNSSEC.
Given that this is an event that has taken more than fifteen
years to come to fruition, I thought it might to useful to have
another look at DNSSEC to mark this long anticipated milestone.
more...
Two Simple Hints for Dual Stack Servers
May 2010
It seems that the imminent prospect of IPv4 address exhaustion has
managed to generate a renewed interest in IPv6. A number of the
conversations I have had lately have been about setting up dual
stack servers, and there is a widespread concern that if you convert
a server from single stack IPv4 to dual stack then some clients will
have problems in accessing your site. The same concern has been
voiced with converting a mail server from single stack to dual
stack.
Here are two very simple hints may be of assistance to you.
more...
Measuring More IPv6
April 2010
Further studies on the amount of end-to-end IPv6
capability in today's Internet reveals that the extent of
full end-to-end IPv6 capability in today's Internet is now
at a level of 5% of all end systems, at least within the
scope of the systems studied here. This number is now at a
level where the level of IPv6 deployment is now passing from
mere statistical interest to mainstream commercial
importance. This month's column takes a more detailed look
at measurement of end-to-end IPv6 support in today's
Internet.
more...
Traffic in Network 1.0.0.0/8
March 2010
It is clear that there is a significant amount of traffic
that is being directed to addresses in 1.0.0.0/8, and it is
well in excess of 10Mbps of sustained load. This traffic is
likely to be a combination of leakage of traffic from private
use domains, potential leakage from mis-configured equipment
and a certain amount of scanning activity that passes across
1.0.0.0/8 as part of a walk across the entire network address
range. The primary objective of this work was to quantify the
extent to which all networks in 1.0.0.0/8 attract "pollution"
or "unwanted" traffic.
more...
Roll Over and Die?
February 2010
It is considered good security practice to treat cryptographic keys
with a healthy level of respect. RFC4641 states: "the longer a key
is in use, the greater the probability that it will have been compromised
through carelessness, accident, espionage, or cryptanalysis." Even though
the risk is considered slight if you have chosen to use a decent key length,
RFC 4641 recommends, as good operational practice, that you should
"roll" your key at regular intervals. What could possibly go wrong?
more...
Addressing 2009
January 2010
It's January again, and being the start of another year, it's as
good a time as any to look at the last 12 months and see what the
Internet has up to in 2009. The Internet's continuing growth can be
viewed using many forms of metrics, including number of connected
customers, the count of web pages, or selected measures of network
traffic. One perspective comes from an examination of the records of address
allocations that were made by the five Regional Internet Registries
(RIRs).
more...
NXDOMAIN?
December 2009
Who would buy non-existent DNS names? Well, it should
come as no surprise that in a world where there is already a
large and valuable market for selling DNS names that are not
Internet-visible as service endpoints, there is also a
valuable market in identifying yet more names that users are
using in their applications that are not even visible to the
DNS. There is value in catching the NXDOMAIN responses from
a DNS resolver and substituting a page impression. There is
value in the so-called practice of "typosquatting".
more...
Stateless and DNSperate!
November 2009
I've often heard it said that the world is full of bad ideas. But no matter how
many bad ideas there may be, the good news is that there is always room for one
more! So in the spirit of "more is better" I'd like to offer the following as yet
another Bad Idea (http://bert.secret-wg.org/BIF/index.html). There is also the
intriguing possibility that this flawed concept could be made to work, making
this a thoroughly Useless Tool (http://bert.secret-wg.org/Tools/index.html) at the
same time!
more...
RIPE at 59!
October 2009
RIPE, or R eacute;seaux IP Europ eacute;ens, is a
collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide
area IP networks in Europe and beyond. The objective of RIPE
is to ensure the administrative and technical coordination
necessary to enable the operation of a pan-European IP
network. RIPE has been a feature of the European Internet
landscape for some twenty years now, and it continues to be
a progressive and engaged forum. These days RIPE meets twice
a year, and the most recent meeting was held at Lisbon,
Portugal, from the 5th to the 9th of October 2009. In this
column I'd like to share some of my impressions of this
meeting.
more...
Is the Transition to IPv6 a "Market Failure?"
September 2009
Many views of the transition to IPv6 assume that the
combination of the factors of the imminent exhaustion of the
unallocated pool of IPv4 addresses and the conventional
dynamics of an open competitive marketplace in the ISP
sector will be sufficient to propel the transition to
IPv6. The question I would like to pose here is: Is this an
appropriate view of the transition to IPv6? An alternative
view is that this transition to IPv6 has already stalled
over the past decade, and we should be prepared to view the
current situation as an instance of a "market failure" in
economic terms, where the transition will require the
impetus of some form of response associated with the
distribution of a "public good", and that conventional
market dynamics are in and of themselves incapable of
sustaining such a transition.
more...
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Geoff is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
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