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Decision Time for the Open Internet

On February 26 of this year the Federal Communications Commission of the United States will vote on a proposed new ruling on the issue of "Network Neutrality" in the United States, bringing into force a new round of measures that are intended to prevent certain access providers from deliberately differentiating service responses on the carriage services that they provide.

Addressing 2014

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. What happened in 2014 and what is likely to happen in 2015? This is an update to the reports prepared at the same time in previous years, so lets 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.

BGP in 2014

The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want to be seen, and the distributed routing system appears to be working smoothly. All appears to be working within reasonable parameters, and there is no imminent danger of some routing catastrophe, as far as we can tell. For a protocol designed some 25 years ago, when the Internet of that time contained some 10,000 constituent networks, its done well to scale fifty-fold, to carry in excess of half a million routed elements by the end of 2014.

The Resolvers We Use

The theme of a workshop, held at the start of December 2014 in Hong Kong, was the considerations of further scaling of the root server system, and the 1½ day workshop was scoped in the form of consideration of approaches to that of the default activity of adding further anycast instances of the existing 13 root server anycast constellations. This was a workshop operating on at least three levels. Firstly there was the overt agenda of working through a number of proposed approaches that could improve the services provided by the DNS root service. The second was an unspoken agenda concerned with protecting the DNS from potential national measures that would “fragment” the DNS name space into a number of spaces, which includes, but by no means not limited to, the DNS blocking activities that occur at national levels. The third level, and an even less acknowledged agenda, is that there are various groups who want to claim a seat at the Root Server table.

The Resolvers We Use

The Internet's Domain Name System is a modern day miracle. It may not represent the largest database that has ever been built, but nevertheless it's truly massive. The DNS is consulted every time we head to a web page, every time we send an email message, or in fact every time we initiate almost any transaction on the Internet. We assume a lot about the DNS. For example, content distribution networks are observed to make use of the location of the DNS resolver as being also the same location as the user. How robust is this assumption of co-locality of users and their resolvers? Are users always located "close" to their resolvers? More generally, what is the relationship between the end user, and the DNS resolvers that they use? Are they in fact closely related? Or is there widespread use of distant resolvers?

Who’s Watching?

It's been more than a year since Edward Snowden released material concerning the activities of US agencies in the area of cyber-intelligence gathering. A year later, and with allegations of various forms of cyber spying flying about, it's probably useful to ask some more questions. What is a reasonable expectation about privacy and the Internet? Should we now consider various forms of digital stalking to be "normal"? To what extent can we see information relating to individuals' activities online being passed to others?

ECDSA and DNSSEC

Yes, that's a cryptic topic, even for an article that addresses matters of the use of cryptographic algorithms, so congratulations for getting even this far! This is a report of a an experiment conducted in September and October 2014 by the authors to measure the extent to which deployed DNSSEC-validating resolvers fully support the use of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) with curve P-256.

NANOG 62

NANOG 62 was held at Baltimore from the 6th to the 9th October. These are my observations on some of the presentations that occurred at this meeting.

Privacy and Security – Five Objectives

It has been a very busy period in the domain of computer security. What with "shellshock", "heartbleed" and NTP monlink adding to the background of open DNS resolvers, port 445 viral nasties, SYN attacks and other forms of vulnerability exploits, it's getting very hard to see the forest for the trees. We are spending large amounts of resources in reacting to various vulnerabilities and attempting to mitigate individual network attacks, but are we making overall progress? What activities would constitute "progress" anyway?

Internet Regulation: Section 706 vs Title II

At the NANOG meeting in Baltimore this week I listened to a presentation by Patrick Gilmore on “The Open Internet Debate: Section 706 vs Title II”. It’s true that this is a title that would normally induce a comatose reaction from any audience, but don’t let the title put you off. Behind this is an impassioned debate about the nature of the retail Internet for the United States, and, I suspect, a debate about the Internet itself and the nature of the industry that provides it.

How Big is That Network?

There is a careful policy path to be followed that encourages continued investment and innovation in national telecommunications-related infrastructure and services, while at the time same time avoiding the formation of market distortions and inefficiencies. What helps in this regulatory process is clear information about the state of the industry itself. One of those pieces of information concerns the market scope of the retail Internet Service Provider sector. To put it another way, how “big” is a particular network? How many customers does it serve? Is its market share increasing or falling?

What’s so special about 512?

The 12th August 2014 was widely reported as a day when the Internet collapsed. Despite the sensational media reports the following day, the condition was not fatal, and perhaps it could be more reasonably reported that some parts of the Internet were having a bad hair day. What was happening was that the Internet’s growth had just exceeded the default configuration limits of certain models of network switching equipment. In this article I'll look at how the growth of the routing table and the scaling in the size of transmission circuits impacts on the internal components of network routing equipment.

The Cost of DNNSEC

If you’re playing in the DNS game, and you haven’t done so already, then you really should be considering turning on security in your part of the DNS by enabling DNSSEC. There are various forms of insidious attack that start with perverting the DNS, and end with the misdirection of an unsuspecting user. DNSSEC certainly allows a DNS resolver to tell the difference between valid intention and misdirection. But there's no such thing as a free lunch, and the decision to turn on DNSSEC is not without some additional cost in terms of traffic load and resolution time. In this article, I'll take our observations from running a large scale DNSSEC adoption measurement experiment and apply them to the question: What’s the incremental cost when turning on DNSSEC?

Where is Metadata Anyway?

There is an emerging picture that while networks, and network operators, make convenient targets for various forms of national security surveillance efforts, the reality of today’s IP network’s are far more complex, and Internet networks are increasingly ignorant about what their customers do. The result is that it's now quite common for Internet networks not to have the information that these security agencies are after. Not only can moderately well-informed users hide their activities from their local network, but increasingly this has been taken out of the hands of users, as the applications we have on our smartphones, tablets and other devices are increasingly making use of the network in ways that are completely opaque to the network provider.

What is Metadata and Why Should I Care?

August 2014 is proving yet again to be an amusing month in the Australian political scene, and in this case the source of the amusement was watching a number of Australian politicians fumble around the topic of digital surveillance and proposed legislation relating to data retention measures.

Some Internet Measurements

At APNIC Labs we’ve been working on developing a new approach to navigating through some of our data sets the describe aspects of IPv6 deployment, the use of DNSSEC and some measurements relating to the current state of BGP.

The Open Internet?

I hear the virtues of the “open Internet” being extolled so much these days that I can’t help but wonder what exactly we are referring to. So let’s ask the question. What is an “open” Internet?

NANOG 61

The recent NANOG 61 meeting was a pretty typical NANOG meeting, with a plenary stream, some interest group sessions, and an ARIN Public Policy session. The meeting attracted some 898 registered attendees, which was the biggest NANOG to date. No doubt the 70 registrations from Microsoft helped in this number, as the location for NANOG 61 was in Bellevue, Washington State, but even so the interest in NANOG continues to grow, and there was a strong European contingent, as well as some Japanese and a couple of Australians. The meeting continues to have a rich set of corridor conversations in addition to the meeting schedule. These corridor conversations are traditionally focused on peering, but these days there are a number of address brokers, content networks, vendors and niche industry service providers added to the mix. Here’s my impressions of some of the presentations at NANOG 61.

RIP Net Neutrality

It's been an interesting couple of months in the ongoing tensions between Internet carriage and content service providers, particularly in the United States. The previous confident assertion was that the network neutrality regulatory measures in that country had capably addressed these tensions. While the demands of the content industry continue to escalate as the Internet rapidly expands into video content streaming models, we are seeing a certain level of reluctance from the carriage providers to continually accommodate these expanding demands within their networks though ongoing upgrades of their own capacity without any impost on the content provider. The veneer of network neutrality is cracking under the pressure, and the arrangements that attempted to isolate content from carriage appear to be failing. What's going on this extended saga about the tensions between carriage and content?