OMB Focuses On Cybersecurity

Ensuring federal cybersecurity is essential to protecting national security. According to some media reports, recommendations have been made to the Bush Administration to "create a distinct administrative cybersecurity position within the Homeland Security Department to oversee progress in the federal government and act as a liaison with private industry." However, before new bureaucracy is created, it is important to recognize the practical cybersecurity policies and projects that are already being undertaken by the Administration. more

Russia Appears to Have Begun Providing an Internet Connection to North Korea

Network experts monitoring North Korea have detected activation of a new internet path out of North Korea. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, along with North Korea expert Martyn Williams, report that at 09:07:51 UTC on 1 October 2017, the country's single internet provider, Star JV (AS131269), gained a new connection to the global internet through Russian fixed-line provider Transtelecom (AS20485), often referred to as TTK. more

2017 North American IPv6 Summit to Be Held at LinkedIn Headquarters

??The collective North American IPv6 Task Forces announced the 2017 North American IPv6 Summit will be held at LinkedIn headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. more

Verisign Should Clear Up the Paid “Analysts” Controversy

In recent days it was revealed that analyst Zeus Kerravala, who had written a dozen-some articles, over many years, for Network World promoting Verisign's pro-.COM point of view and disparaging new top-level domains as a bad idea, was in fact a paid Verisign consultant. None of that was disclosed when Mr. Kerravala wrote these articles from January 2013 through October 2015. more

China’s Pursuit of Public International Cybersecurity Law Leadership

There are relatively few venues today for the development of public international cybersecurity law among Nation States. One was the United Nations Group of Governmental Experts (UNGGE) at which the U.S. several months ago announced its de facto withdrawal with some concern expressed. A much older, well-established venue is newly assuming considerable significance - the Expert Group on the International Telecommunication Regulations (EG-ITRs). more

Community Statement Presented at Wuzhen Summit

China is holding the First Internet Conference in the rivertown of Wuzhen, calling for global Internet interconnectivity and shared governance by all. Founders of China's top three Internet companies Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu as well as executives from global giants including Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook all joined the gala. more

Digging Through the Problem of IPv6 and Email - Part 1

Recently, a couple of anti-spam (or at least email security related) bloggers have written some articles about IPv6 and the challenges that the email industry faces regarding it. John Levine, who has written numerous RFCs and a couple of books about spam fighting, writes the following in his article "A Politically Incorrect Guide to IPv6, part III". more

European Data Regulators Throw ICANN Back to the Drawing Board for a Third Time on Whois Privacy

In a letter to ICANN, the chair of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) makes it plain that even the organization's "interim" plan is fundamentally flawed, reports Kieren McCarthy in the Register. more

A Programmer’s Perspective on the IANA Transition

Earlier this week, I posted from Singapore on the challenges we face in designing the transition of IANA functions from the US government to the global multistakeholder community. Now, let's consider how a programmer would design new mechanisms to accomplish this transition. For starters, a programmer would need something more than high-level principles. Coding requires use cases for routine interaction and especially for cases where users don't follow the expected routine and where the real world intervenes with inconvenient problems. more

Visibility of Prefix Lengths in IPv4 and IPv6

Internet routes are specified for an address prefix. The shorter the prefix, the more general the route. A shorter prefix covers more address space and thus a bigger part of the Internet. Very long prefixes cover few addresses and are used for local routing close to the destination address. In general, it is not necessary to distribute very long prefixes to the whole Internet, because a more general, shorter prefix is sufficient to direct packets in the direction of the destination. more

The Long Gestation and Afterlife of New gTLDs

ICANN continues to flail, pointlessly. The latest in a series of missteps that could easily have been avoided is its recommendations on what to do about a report on the potential for confusion and misaddressing when someone's internal network names match the name for a new gTLD, and they have misconfigured their routers and/or DNS to the extent that someone typing in a new gTLD name might end up in the middle of someone else's network. more

DNSSEC Adds Value?

The recent news that .uk, .arpa and .org may sign their zones sometime this year is indeed good news. Each domain is highly significant... As the DNSSEC registry infrastructure moves inexorably forward -- primarily driven by top level pressure and considerations of National Interest -- it now behoves us to clearly articulate the benefits of DNSSEC to domain owners and registrars. In particular I want to focus on the vast majority of us to whom cold, hard cash is important and parting with it requires as a minimum tangible benefits or, in extreme cases, surgical intervention. more

Transparency: The Internet’s Only Currency

I don't know about you, but I am angry. I am angry with the state of the world and our incapacity to do something about it. I am angrier because, in all this, I thought that the Internet would be the place where we would see collective action at its best. But, that's not going to happen. At least, anytime soon. Is it time to admit that the Internet has turned toxic? No. But, it is time to ask ourselves the question... more

New gTLDs and Concept of a Universal Directory

The concept of a universal directory does not exist on the Internet. There are thousands of directories of all kinds and online Yellow Pages in many countries. All of these websites are different, accessed differently and operated differently: for example, Yellow Pages in France are different from their equivalent in Spain and Italy. There is no standard directory operated behind the same name worldwide. more

Securing the DNS in a Post-Quantum World: New DNSSEC Algorithms on the Horizon

One of the "key" questions cryptographers have been asking for the past decade or more is what to do about the potential future development of a large-scale quantum computer. If theory holds, a quantum computer could break established public-key algorithms including RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), building on Peter Shor's groundbreaking result from 1994. more