There is a saying, attributed to Abraham Maslow, that when all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. A variation is that when all you have is a hammer, then all you can do it hit things! For a legislative body, when all you can do is enact legislation, then that’s all you do! Even when it’s pretty clear that the underlying issues do not appear to be all that amenable to legislative measures, some legislatures will boldly step forward into the uncertain morass and legislate where wiser heads may have taken a more cautious and considered stance.
In this article I'd like to look at the roles of Security Extensions for the DNS (DNSSEC) and DNS over Transport Layer Security (DoT) and question DoT could conceivably replace DNSSEC in the DNS.
Four years ago we started looking at the level of support for ECDSA in DNSSEC. At the time we concluded that ECDSA was just not supported broadly enough to be usable. Four years later, let's see if we can provide an updated answer to the question of the viability of ECDSA.
In this article I’d like to look at some BGP security topics that have come up during the July 2018 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and try to place these items into some bigger context of routing security.
In this article I’d like to explore a common aspect of measurements of the Internet’s Domain Name system. It’s nowhere near as formally stated as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and cannot be proved formally, but the assertion is very similar, namely that there is a basic limit to the accuracy of measurements that can be made about the behaviour and properties of the DNS.
The evolutionary path of any technology can often take strange and unanticipated turns and twists. At some points simplicity and minimalism can be replaced by complexity and ornamentation, while at other times a dramatic cut-through exposes the core concepts of the technology and removes layers of superfluous additions. The evolution of the Internet appears to be no exception and contains these same forms of unanticipated turns and twists. In thinking about the technology of the Internet over the last ten years, it appears that it’s been a very mixed story about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same.
It's been six years since World IPv6 Launch day on the 6th June 2012. In those six years we've managed to place ever increasing pressure on the dwindling pools of available IPv4 addresses, but we have still been unable to complete the transition to an all-IPv6 Internet.
One of the more pressing and persistent problems today is the treatment of fragmented packets. We are seeing a very large number of end-to-end paths that no longer support the transmission of fragmented IP datagrams. What can the DNS do to mitigate this issue?
I’m sure that there are folk who believe that bodies like the IETF can exercise just the right level of restraint and process management to keep excessive levels of both camelling and bikeshedding out of the IETF and its Working Groups activities. Speaking personally, I just can’t see that happening.
I'm never surprised by the ability of an IETF Working Group to obsess over what to any outside observer would appear to be a completely trivial matter. Even so, I was impressed to see a large-scale discussion emerge over a single bit in a transport protocol being standardized by the IETF.
March has seen the first of the DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (OARC) workshops for the year, where two days where too much DNS is just not enough!
Has the adoption of DNSSEC already peaked well before any level of complete deployment? If so that what might that mean for the way in which we manage security and resilience on the Internet?
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.
This is a report on the experience with the Internet's inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.
In the United States the debate between advocates of market-based resolution of competitive tensions and regulatory intervention has seldom reached the fever pitch that we've seen over the vexed on-again off-again question of Net Neutrality in recent weeks. How can we assist and inform that debate? One way is to bring together the various facets of how we build, operate and use the Internet and look at these activities from a perspective of economics. This is the background to a relatively unique gathering, hosted each year by CAIDA, the Centre for Applied Internet Data Analysis, at the University of California, San Diego, at WIE, the Workshop on Internet Economics. These are my notes from the 8th such workshop, held in December 2017.
It strikes me as odd to see a developed and, by any reasonable standard, a prosperous economy getting into so much trouble with its public communications policy framework.
Here, I'd like to look at ways that recursive resolvers in the DNS can take some further steps that assist other parts of the DNS, notably the set of authoritative name servers, including root zone servers, to function more efficiently, and to mitigate some of the negative consequences if these authoritative name servers are exposed to damaging DOS attacks.
I’d like to look in a little more detail at the efforts to hide the DNS behind HTTPS, and put the work in the IETF's DOH Working Group into a broader perspective. There are a number of possible approaches here, and they can be classified according to the level of interaction between the DNS application and the underlying HTTPS encrypted session.