[Editor’s Note: A limited number of student grants are available to help pay for travel, accommodations, and NDSS Symposium registration fees for full-time students attending the 24th annual Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. Watch the NDSS website at https://www.internetsociety.org/events/ndss-symposium for information and deadlines as the process opens for NDSS 2018 in February of next year. The following post is a guest contribution from one 2017 grantee.]

I'm grateful to Christian de Larrinaga, from the Internet Society's UK Chapter, for pointing me to a recent publication by the World Bank: "Principles on identification for sustainable development: toward the digital age".

The premise of the report is this: full participation in today's societies and achievement of one's desired potential are increasingly likely to depend on the ability to identify oneself; however, some 1.5 billion people are reckoned to lack "legal identification", and action should be taken to remedy this.

It should come as no surprise that there are numerous activities related to Trust, Identity, and Privacy on the agenda for IETF 98. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities and provide pointers to a number of additional ones. There is something for everyone interested in these areas in Chicago in the coming week!

IETF 98 in Chicago next week seems to be relatively quiet from an encryption perspective compared to some past meetings. However, this could be viewed as an indication of the progress that has been made in recent years as the IETF community has focused heavily on enabling encryption across protocols and updating the cryptographic algorithms being used in those protocols. There is not a great deal of activity specific to encryption in Chicago, and the work represented here this week is quite mature.

In this Rough Guide to IETF 98 post I'll highlight some of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) groups meeting during the IETF 98 meeting in Chicago 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 tsvwg WG will include presentations and discussions on the L4S and DualQ approaches demonstrated at previous meetings. The WG has two meetings on Monday and Thursday afternoons.

In this post for the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 98, I’m reviewing what’s happening related to IPv6 at IETF 98 in Chicago next week.

IPv6 global adoption rates increased by over 50% last year as pools of IPv4 addresses approached depletion at 4 of the 5 Regional Internet Registries, encouraging more network operators and content providers to actively deploy the protocol. With more large ISPs and mobile operators having announced plans to deploy IPv6 during 2017, and increasing interest in Home Networking and the Internet of Things, IPv6 is at the forefront of standardisation work at the IETF.

Let’s look at what’s happening in the area of Internet infrastructure resilience in the IETF and at the upcoming IETF 98 meeting. My focus here is primarily on the routing and forwarding planes and specifically routing security and unwanted traffic of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) attacks. There is interesting and important work underway at the IETF that can help address problems in both areas.

The latest issue of the IETF Journal (Volume 12, Issue 3) is now available online: https://www.ietfjournal.org/journal-issues/march-2017/

Our cover article is a manifesto of why Internet-enabled businesses should care about the open standards and open source communities. We present the first two of a series of interviews with IETF leadership, in this case outgoing IETF chair Jari Arkko and his successor Alissa Cooper.

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 98 meeting in Chicago next week. Check out the IETF Journal IoT Category for more details about many of these topics.

It’s almost here! Pack your bags (or start your remote participation browser) and get ready for IETF 98! Starting on Sunday, 26 March, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in Chicago, Illinois, 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 on topics of mutual interest:

We’re excited to share news of the second Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW2017), which will take place in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 15. This one-day workshop will be co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Internet Society and the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The Call for Papers is open now, with a deadline of 3 April.

I recently attended the DNS Privacy Workshop colocated with this year’s NDSS 2017 in San Diego, California. DNS privacy has received considerable attention from researchers and engineers since the Snowden revelations of state-backed pervasive surveillance in 2013 and the workshop covered a lot of ground.

That was the question Bruce Schneier and I were asked by Craig Spietzle of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) during a panel he moderated recently at the RSA conference.

My answer to that question was “an unequivocal yes!” Below is the longer answer. The key lies in accountability.

Akamai has published its Q4 2016 State of the Internet/Security report As always, an interesting read and an opportunity to look at trends in attacks.

Not all trends are up and to the right. As the report states, Q4 2016 was "the third consecutive quarter where we noticed a decrease in the number of attack triggers". Still, "the overall 2016 attack count was up 4% as compared to 2015". Also, the volume and number of "mega-attacks" is on the rise.

A number of seminal papers appeared towards the end of the 20th century calling for more attention to be paid to the human in the security loop. For example, Anne Adams and Angela Sasse’s “Users are not the Enemy” and Mark Ackerman and Lorrie Cranor’s "Privacy critics: UI components to safeguard users' privacy." The research field of Usable Security was thereby launched, and quickly garnered interest amongst academics and in industry. Almost two decades later this field has achieved independent status with a number of conferences and workshops being dedicated to this research field.

The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2017) is just around the corner (26 February - 1 March), and details of the program are quickly coming into focus. The full slate of activities includes two keynotes, two workshops, and a full program of excellent peer-reviewed academic research papers.

NDSS 2017 is almost here! The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) symposium fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. NDSS 2017 takes place February 26 through March 1, 2017, at Catamaran Resort Hotel & Spa in San Diego, California.

Here are some upcoming deadlines you should know about: