[Note: This post was originally published on the MANRS Blog at https://www.routingmanifesto.org/2017/09/new-study-understanding-manrs-potential-for-enterprises-and-service-providers/.]

Time is something that is often overlooked or taken for granted, but the accuracy and reliability of time is critical to our lives and must be protected. Time is a core concept underlying nearly all physical and virtual systems. Distributed computer systems, key to many functions inherent in our daily lives, rely on accurate and reliable time, yet we rarely stop and think about how that time is constructed and represented. Accurate and reliable time is needed to determine when an event occurs, in what order a particular sequence of events occurs, or when to schedule an event that is to occur at a particular time in the future.

Last Friday, 25 August, a routing incident caused large-scale internet disruption. It hit Japanese users the hardest, slowing or blocking access to websites and online services for dozens of Japanese companies.

What happened is that Google accidentally leaked BGP prefixes it learned from peering relationships, essentially becoming a transit provider instead of simply exchanging traffic between two networks and their customers. This also exposed some internal traffic engineering that caused many of these prefixes to get de-aggregated and therefore raised their probability of getting accepted elsewhere.

The nonstop news about Internet security vulnerabilities and incidents could lead one to despair for the future of the Internet. However, what often does not make the news is all the quality research that contributes ultimately to a more secure, private, and trustworthy Internet. Quality academic research that is open and easily accessible is one of our best long-term investments in a truly open and trustable Internet.

I was recently invited to contribute a paper on personal data in the healthcare context to a journal on the Privacy and Security of Medical Information published by Springer-Nature. The paper, “Trust and ethical data handling in the healthcare context” examines the issues associated with healthcare data in terms of ethics, privacy, and trust, and makes recommendations about what we, as individuals, should ask for and expect from the organisations we entrust with our most sensitive personal data.

It's a topical subject, from an Internet Society perspective, because the Internet appears to offer some attractive solutions to pressing problems that confront people and governments, around the globe.

Encryption is once again a hot topic, and there’s much to discuss at IETF 99 this week in Prague. This time the hottest action will definitely be in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) working group. TLS is considering everything from privacy implications for TLS1.3 to how to reduce handshake latency. As mentioned in previous Rough Guide blogs on the topic, the working group is busy on the completion of the TLS 1.3 specification. It has completed working group last call, and the working group is addressing the comments received during that process. Draft 21 was released on 3 July in anticipation of this week’s discussion.

Trust, Identity, and Privacy continue to be topics of interest for the IETF community. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities. There is something for everyone interested in these areas here at IETF 99 in Prague this week!

[Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the MANRS blog.]

Verisign, a renowned security solutions provider and a DNS registry and root server operator, demonstrated its commitment to ensuring that the global routing system becomes more secure by joining Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) today.

In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 99, I’m reviewing what’ll be happening at IETF 99 in Prague next week.

IETF 99 is next week in Prague, and I’d like to take a moment to discuss some of the interesting things happening there related to Internet infrastructure resilience in this installment of the Rough Guide to IETF 99.

Simple solutions sometimes have a huge impact. Like a simple requirement that “routes are neither imported nor exported unless specifically enabled by configuration”, as specified in an Internet draft “Default EBGP Route Propagation Behavior Without Policies”. The draft is submitted to IESG and expected to be published as a Standards Track RFC soon.

The July 2017 issue of the IETF Journal is now online at http://www.ietfjournal.org/journal-issues/july-2017/. With IETF 99 in Prague just over one week away, this is the perfect time to get caught up on what's been happening in the world of Internet standards lately.

In this post I'll highlight some of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) groups meeting during the IETF 99 meeting in Prague next week. These groups are working to explore and address more sophisticated ways to use and share available bandwidth, improve Internet performance, and otherwise efficiently get Internet content to where it needs to be.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a buzzword around the Internet industry and the broader technology and innovation business. We are often asked what the IETF is doing in relation to IoT and in this short post I'd like to highlight some of the relevant sessions scheduled during the upcoming IETF 99 meeting in Prague. Check out the IETF Journal IoT Category or the Internet Society's IoT page for more details about many of these topics.

Time to get ready for IETF 99! Starting a week from today, on Sunday, 16 July, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in Prague, Czech Republic, where about 1000 engineers will spend a week discussing the latest issues in open standards and protocols. As usual, the agenda is packed, and the Internet Society is providing a ‘Rough Guide’ to the IETF via a series of blog posts all this week on topics of mutual interest:

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not just a device connected to the Internet - it is a complex, rapidly evolving system. To understand the implications, analyse risks, and come up with effective security solutions we need to look ahead and take into account other components, such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

On the 27^th of April 2017, the 29^th DNSSEC root-signing ceremony took place.

Two years ago, our “Collaborative Security Approach” proposed a way of tackling Internet security issues based on the fundamental properties of the Internet and the voluntary cooperation and collaboration that’s been prominent throughout the Internet's history. In this post, let us look at each of the five key Collaborative Security characteristics as they apply to security of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Internet Society Chief Internet Technology Officer Olaf Kolkman will be speaking this week in both Washington, DC, and New York City on the Internet of Things (IoT), collaborative security, and our recent merger with the Online Trust Alliance. Two of the three events will be livestreamed and all have open registrations to attend in person.

My colleague Robin Wilton and I participated in the recent Trust and Internet Identity Meeting Europe (TIIME) in Vienna, Austria, co-sponsored by the Internet Society and organized by long-time notable identeratus Rainer Hörbe.

This meeting brought together approximately 100 people who are engaged in advancing the state of the art and strengthening trust around online identity. Structured as an “unconference,” it was up to the attendees to set the agenda and lead the sessions. As you can see from the session list the meeting covered a lot of ground.