Russ White

Author Archives: Russ White

Is The OSI Model Good For Understanding How Networks Work? Not Really

Looking back at my career in network engineering, beyond some basic concepts and naming conventions, I cannot remember using the OSI model once. Not for troubleshooting, not for protocol design. I have used the concept of layering, but never the OSI model specifically.

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Writing An IETF Draft: Document Streams And Document Status

So far in this series we’ve discussed the history of the IETF, some of the tools you might want to use when building an IETF submission, and document formatting. There are other seemingly mystical concepts in the IETF process as well—for instance, what is a “document stream,” and what is a document’s “status?” Let’s look […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 8: IPv6 Addresses And Privacy

One of the biggest advantages of IPv6 is the ease of renumbering thanks to SLAAC and DHCPv6. Easy renumbering of IPv6 addresses should, in theory, make some privacy protection methods easy to implement. Here's how it works, and and how it doesn't solve all privacy problems.

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Chatbot Attack Vectors And Failure Modes In Networking And IT

With the release of ChatGPT as a product, Microsoft brought Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) back into focus for millions of users—including network operators, coders, and other folks in information technology. People are once against asking if this technology will make them redundant or how it might change their day-to-day jobs. As always, […]

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Writing An IETF Draft: Formatting, Authorship, And Submissions

This series started by discussing the history of the IETF and some of the tools you might use to build submissions to the IETF process. This, the second, post, will consider document formatting and two of the (sometimes) more difficult sections of an IETF draft to fill in. Formatting Just using one of the acceptable […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 7: DNS Queries And Having A Breach Plan

In the final post in this privacy series, Russ White looks at privacy information that can be gleaned from DNS queries, and outlines essential steps in developing your breach plan. Don't have a breach plan? Here's your opportunity to start one.

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Privacy and Networking Part 6: Essential Questions For Privacy Best Practices

Thus far, I’ve concluded that IP addresses and other information network operators handle is personally identifiable (PII) and covered under privacy and security regulations. I’ve also looked at the data lifecycle and user rights related to private data. What are some best practices network operators can follow to reduce their risk? The simplest way to […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 5: The Data Lifecycle

In the previous posts in this series, I concluded that privacy is everyone’s responsibility, that IP addresses (and a lot of other information network engineers handle) are protected information, and while processing packets probably doesn’t trigger any privacy warnings, network logging should and does. In this post, I want to start answering the question—okay, what […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 4: Logging

In the last post on this topic, I concluded that IP addresses are protected information—operators should handle users’ IP addresses according to privacy best practices. But I also concluded that because IP addresses used for forwarding— Are collected (or carried through the network) only for forwarding The user cannot reasonably expect the network to forward […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 2: Legal And Ethical Privacy

Given the arguments from the first article in this series, if privacy should be and is essential—what does the average network engineer do with this information? How does privacy impact network design and operations? To answer this question, we need to look at two other questions. First, what is private information, precisely? The network carries […]

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